A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood 9781851969173, 9781315653013

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A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF ELIZA HAYWOOD

Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies Series Editor:

J. A. Downie

Titles in this Series 1 Daniel Defoe P. N. Furbank & W. R. Owens 2 Jonathan Swift David Oakleaf 3 Delarivier Manley Rachel Carnell 4 Henry Fielding J. A. Downie 5 Richard Steele Charles Knight 6 Alexander Pope Pat Rogers 7 William King Christopher Fauske 8 John Toland Michael Brown

Forthcoming Titles Samuel Johnson Nicholas Hudson Thomas Paine W. A. Speck Joseph Addison Charles Knight Frances Burney Lorna J. Clark Maria Edgeworth Susan Manly

A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF ELIZA HAYWOOD

by Kathryn R. King

First published 2012 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited

Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Taylor & Francis 2012 © Kathryn R. King 2012 To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. british library cataloguing in publication data King, Kathryn R. A political biography of Eliza Haywood. – (Eighteenth-century political biographies) 1. Haywood, Eliza Fowler, 1693?–1756. 2. Haywood, Eliza Fowler, 1693?– 1756 – Political and social views. 3. Women authors, English – 18th century – Biography. 4. Authors, English – 18th century – Biography. 5. Politics and literature – Great Britain – History – 18th century. 6. Politics in literature. I. Title II. Series 828.5’09-dc23 ISBN-13: 978-1-85196-917-3 (hbk)

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Biographical Prolegomenon

vii ix xi

Introduction 1 ‘Her Approach to Fame’: 1714–29 2 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia 3 Theatrical Thirties: 1729–37 4 Adventures of Eovaai 5 At the Sign of Fame: 1741–4 6 The Female Spectator 7 The Parrot 8 Epistles for the Ladies 9 Was Haywood a Jacobite? Epilogue: The Invisible Spy

1 17 35 55 73 95 111 133 155 177 193

Notes Works Cited Index

203 243 259

Page Intentionally Left Blank

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due first to Alan Downie for welcoming Eliza Haywood into the Eighteenth-Century Political Biographies series and for inviting me to contribute the volume. I am grateful as well to the many scholars who over the years have answered queries, read and critiqued my work, invited me to speak, shared unpublished work and the wealth of their databases, and supplied me with leads, dinners and sometimes living quarters. They are so many that I regret I can do no more than name them here: Paula Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Katherine Binhammer, Christine Blouch, Susan Carlile, Rachel Carnell, Norma Clarke, Gillian Dow, Patsy Fowler, Christine Gerrard, Michael Harris, Alecksondra Hultquist, Paul Hunter, Catherine Ingrassia, Susan Lanser, Bob Markley, Jean Marsden, Chris Mounsey, Niall MacKenzie, Leah Orr, Alex Pettit, Laura Rosenthal, Laura Runge, Betty Schellenberg, Norbert Schürer, the late Hans Turley, Cynthia Wall. Generous grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Philosophical Society provided me with sustained time in the British Library. Financial (and other) support from the University of Montevallo enabled me to keep the project moving during times of heavy teaching and administrative responsibilities. I must thank especially Terry Roberson and Mary Beth Armstrong for their support and encouragement. I was fortunate enough to spend two weeks at Chawton House Library and cannot speak highly enough of the warmth and helpfulness of the staff and the sheer gloriousness of the Stables. This book could not have been written without the assistance of the Interlibrary Loan team at the University of Montevallo. I honour them all by naming just one, the late Mary Seagle, the ILL goddess, whose raucous laughter was as welcome as the books she never failed to locate. Portions of earlier stages of this book were read by Paula Backscheider, Alan Downie and Vida Muse and I am grateful for their suggestions. Karen Rutherford and Joe Walsh gave valuable assistance in the final stages; Tonja Battle was always available for consultation. A special shout-out to Sarah Creel for reading every word and cheering me down the home stretch. Her enthusiasm for Haywood and strong arm carried me through. My students are always teaching me new things about Haywood; I thank them all and bow in admiration to the – vii –

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

graduate student who now bears a tattoo of the famous frontispiece portrait on her arm. Portions of this book were written in South Africa and for sustenance of many kinds I must thank my friends in Agulhas, especially Peta Van Gass, Chris Van Gass and Cairen Hackney. One of my greatest debts is to Tom Lockwood. For many years he has read my work and listened to my thinking about Eliza Haywood and he always asks the right questions. His wit, curiosity, and sardonic intelligence have inspired and shaped much of what I like best about this book. Another debt not easily repaid is owing to those who have reminded me that there is life outside the Haywood cave: especially Stephen Collins, Joe Walsh (again), and of course Ruth Looper. My proud mother read the biography of Jane Barker I published some years ago but admitted to being frustrated by its academic vocabulary. Write something I can enjoy, she said. She did not live to read A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood but I know she would have appreciated its feisty subject and hope she would have taken pleasure in parts of the story. To Mary M. King this book is dedicated.

ABBREVIATIONS

Baker

BL Corr.

DNB ECF ECS ELH FS GM LEP MR N&Q ODNB OEJ RES SEL WEP Works

D. E. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House; or An Historical Account of All the Dramatic Writers (and their Works) that have Appeared in Great Britain and Ireland … in the Form of a Dictionary (London, 1764). A new edition, revised by Isaac Reed appeared in 1782 as Biographia Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Play House … Continued from 1764 to 1782 (London, 1782) British Library Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Sir Horace Mann, ed. W. S. Lewis, W. H. Smith and G. L. Lam, Series: The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953) Dictionary of National Biography Eighteenth-Century Fiction Eighteenth-Century Studies English Literary History Female Spectator Gentleman’s Magazine London Evening Post Monthly Review Notes and Queries Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Old England, or, The Constitutional Journal Review of English Studies Studies in English Literature Whitehall Evening Post Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, ed. A. Pettit, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000–1)

– ix –

BIOGRAPHICAL PROLEGOMENON

Her death, at least, is certain: Eliza Haywood died on 25 February 1756.1 The obituary notices have her aged sixty, but David E. Baker’s 1764 account has her sixty-three.2 Since no documentation of her birth has been found and Baker’s death date is certainly off by three years – he places it in 1759 – the date of birth in standard accounts is a perpetually quizzical ‘1693?’. She was buried on 3 March in St. Margaret’s churchyard, Westminster, but her residence at the time of death is uncertain, although some addresses have been proposed.3 Baker records that she was born in London and that her father was ‘in the Mercantile Way’ but otherwise has nothing to say about the specifics of her birth, parentage, family connections, position in the social scale, upbringing or education. ‘As to the Circumstances of Mrs. Heywood’s Life’, he writes too truly, ‘very little Light seems to appear’. In a letter preserved in the British Library to a potential patron addressed only as ‘Sir’, Haywood gives her maiden name as Fowler – this is the only surviving reference to her Fowler origins – and describes herself as ‘nearly related to Sr Richard of the Grange’.4 Scholars agree in identifying ‘Sr Richard’ as Sir Richard Fowler of Harnage Grange, Shropshire, but how ‘near’ the relation is a matter of speculation. Presumably if Haywood were very nearly related – as a sister, say – she would have said so.5 Family pedigrees do give Sir Richard a younger sister named Elizabeth but of this Elizabeth nothing is known, and it is a very common name. Our Eliza may have been born and bred in the Shropshire countryside or, as seems more likely, born to a London family engaged in some fashion in trade or commerce. Christine Blouch reports that parish registers record several Elizabeths born to London Fowlers at this time, but these have proved to be untraceable; others have doubtless vanished from the historical record.6 George F. Whicher identified her father as a ‘small shop-keeper’ but his account derives ultimately from Baker and the latter’s more capacious term ‘mercantile’ allows for a broader range of possibilities. It has been estimated that by 1688 there may have been as many as ‘5,000 London traders above the rank of ordinary shopmen’.7 Young Eliza Fowler may have assisted her struggling parents in a trade or she may have lived in splendour with her merchant family above the counting house in a handsome mansion somewhere in the City. We can only guess. – xi –

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She enters the historical record in autumn 1714 in the cast lists of Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre. By this time she was calling herself Haywood, presumably having married a man by that name, but our Mr Haywood is as uncertain as the mercantile Mr Fowler.8 He has no first name, dates, family of origin or occupation beyond the possibility, for which there is only the barest hint, that he had been a strolling player.9 We can at least be certain she never wed the improbable husband supplied by Whicher in the person of the Revd Valentine Haywood, that delicious misalliance having been exploded by Blouch, but now that the biography is deprived of the story of the runaway clergyman’s wife, scholars are left with almost no story at all.10 The usual assumption is that the husband died or disappeared before she embarked upon her public career – the ODNB entry has her a single woman by 1719 – but there is no convincing evidence to prove or disprove this claim.11 As for the children, what scant information we have comes from two letters from the late twenties. The first, datable to 1729, laments that ‘an unfortunate marriage has reduc’d me to the melancholly necessity of depending on my Pen for the support of myself and two children, the eldest of whom is not more than 7 years of Age’.12 The other, probably from the previous year, refers to the ‘sudden Deaths of both a Father, and a Husband, at an age when I was little prepar’d to stem the tide of Ill fortune’.13 The specific ‘age’ itself is left frustratingly vague but if these letters can be trusted, one gathers Mr Haywood was dead by 1728 and she had the care of two children, the eldest born around 1722. No independent evidence of the children survives, however, unless one is willing to accept Pope’s manuscript notation, equal parts malice and hearsay, that ‘She had 2 Bas: / tards, others say / three’.14 That two children should sink from the historical record without a trace suggests the possibility that they died young.15 Her status as a widow at least is corroborated by a deposition from 1750 which identifies her as ‘Elizabeth Haywood of Durham Yard in the Strand Widow’.16 There we have it, the biographical ‘facts’, such as they are. She was born a Fowler, became a Haywood, bore two children, was widowed and never remarried. To know Haywood, we must turn our attention to the public life.

INTRODUCTION

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet, Eliza Haywood insisted that she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way’. This was a flat out lie, of course, but to some it will come as news that an author known for her scandalous novels of sexual passion wrote anything in a political way, never mind that her politics might be the subject of an entire book. Others may be surprised that facts enough exist to fill out a full-scale biography, political or otherwise. Haywood is without question an uncooperative biographical subject. Just four letters survive, each an attempt to secure patronage, and as her bibliographer Patrick Spedding has noted, the manuscript sources total fewer than one thousand words.1 If contemporaries recorded their impressions of Haywood their comments have gone missing, with a few notorious exceptions. She was a voluminous writer and readers will find that her imaginative works abound in fascinating self-inscriptions and authorial self-representations, but apart from some prefaces and dedications, mostly from the 1720s, she seldom speaks in propria persona or comments directly on herself. Autobiography was ‘almost the only form of writing not attempted by Eliza Haywood in the course of her long career as an adventuress in letters’, an early biographer noted.2 It seems unlikely at this date that even the most strenuous archival digging will yield up the diary, journal or cache of personal letters that would throw light on the personal or private life. A century ago George F. Whicher wrote that ‘Mrs. Haywood’s one resemblance to Shakespeare is the obscurity that covers the events of her life’.3 We reject today the condescension of an earlier generation, but the stubborn fact remains that little in the way of biographical data survives. In short, Haywood presents the biographer with something of a conundrum: she is a scandalous figure without a personal life. But for over four decades she performed in the public eye as an actress, novelist, translator, playwright, publisher, essayist and political journalist, and that life is amply documented. From the mid-1730s she wrote ‘in a political way’, developing a flexible feministinflected Patriot politics very much her own which enabled her to comment on contemporary affairs while continuing to subject female existence to the searching examination she began in the amatory fictions of the 1720s. The present –1–

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

biography is scant on startling revelations about the inner life – her thoughts and feelings, even to some extent her ‘true’ political views – but it does provide a great deal of new information about a remarkable public life, including her theatrical ambitions, friendships, political alliances, business associations, households and living arrangements, and it casts new light on her character and sensibility, especially her desire for fame. The political biography format, it turns out, is ideally suited to tell the story of a shape-shifting author who used a variety of means, including political commentary, to make herself heard in the public sphere all the while concealing the personal life behind a succession of masks. The paucity of information on the life has been a theme in Haywood studies from the start. The earliest biographical notice, David E. Baker’s indispensible entry in his 1764 Companion to the Play-House, known sometimes as the Biographia Dramatica, remarks upon the obscurity surrounding ‘the Circumstances of Mrs. Heywood’s Life’. Baker then recounts an anecdote, one of few preserved, which speaks to Haywood’s deep apprehension of the power of print to distort, and which may help explain why so little of Haywood’s private life ever entered the public record. According to an unnamed source, Haywood asked that all particulars of her life be suppressed ‘from a Supposition of some improper Liberties being taken with her Character after Death by the Intermixture of Truth and Falshood with her History’. Baker reports that ‘she laid a solemn Injunction on a particular person who was well acquainted with all the Particulars of it not to communicate to any one the least Circumstance relating to her’.4 Despite speculation, the identity of this ‘particular person’ remains unknown, but the fact that so little real information about the life leaked out either before or after her death may attest to her ability to inspire loyalty in her friends. Baker is the source of nearly all early biographical accounts, including Clara Reeve’s better known The Progress of Romance (1785), but starting with Sidney Lee in the late nineteenth century a small but dogged group of scholars has done its best to enlarge upon the information in The Companion to the Play-House. Lee’s entry to the original Dictionary of National Biography (1891) presented new information that made its way into a number of early twentieth-century studies.5 The most important of these is Whicher’s The Life and Romances of Mrs Eliza Haywood, published in 1915, which gathered together just about everything that could reasonably be surmised about the life and more, for as will be seen it introduced some piquant errors into the mix. As late as 1998, Paula Backscheider, one of Haywood’s most attentive modern critics, could write that almost ‘nothing useful is known of Haywood’s life’, and she was right.6 But much has changed since then. The modern era in Haywood biographical studies began in 1991 when Christine Blouch, then a graduate student, published in Studies in English Literature a biographical essay entitled ‘Eliza Haywood and the

Introduction

3

Romance of Obscurity’ that vigorously swept away the myth of the runaway wife of a clergyman introduced by Whicher in The Life and Romances and brought to light new details relating to her background. Blouch’s essay in effect kick-started modern Haywood biographical studies and inaugurated analysis of the role of the politics of literary reputation in shaping the image of Haywood still in circulation. Some of the same information reappears in the more fully elaborated biographical essay that opens the six-volume Pickering & Chatto The Selected Works of Eliza Haywood that began publication in 2000.7 These are keenly intelligent essays and have been welcomed for their new information, but it must be admitted that Blouch was so eager to get anything potentially relevant into print that they can seem somewhat jumbled and stretches of them are unabashedly conjectural. Some of her surmises have opened up whole new pockets of inaccuracy, or at least dubious inference, especially regarding Haywood’s motherhood and sexual relationships. The next milestone came with Patrick Spedding’s A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), also from Pickering & Chatto, which unusually for a bibliographic study presents biographical findings as well as detailed information regarding the publication history of the texts. The ‘bio-bibliography’, to use the term Spedding applied to Whicher’s Life and Romances, often makes good on its author’s hope that ‘detailed bibliographical analysis would reveal details of Haywood’s life’.8 The massive Bibliography, often described by reviewers as magisterial – 848 closely printed pages, a seemingly exhaustive record of the publication history of the vast Haywood oeuvre – is indeed a monumental achievement that makes a study such as the present political biography imaginable. However, and this seems inevitable in any developing field, the Bibliography has serious flaws and these are now beginning to receive attention. Spedding is tendentious, careless or both in his reading of biographical evidence. He uncritically accepts some of Blouch’s questionable conclusions and introduces distortions and misrepresentations of his own, biographical but also bibliographical. Some of his conclusions are now being challenged, notably by Leah Orr in a forceful critique of his methods of attribution, and later in this book I will have occasion to correct his account of Haywood’s activities as a bookseller and publisher.9 Nonetheless, the research and knowledge distilled in the Bibliography provides a platform for the present study and informs virtually every page. His biographical findings and, if Orr is right, even some of the attributions must be used with caution, but the Bibliography remains all the same a magnificent achievement that must be regarded as the starting point for any investigation of Haywood’s professional career. A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood is the first full-length biographical treatment of its subject in nearly a century and the first ever comprehensive

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

assessment of her politics. It corrects many misunderstandings, brings to light new information about the life and career and offers fresh readings of a number of texts, both familiar and unfamiliar. That this biography is able to add significantly to the foundational research of Baker, Lee, Whicher, Blouch, Spedding and many others who will be encountered in this study, including Thomas Lockwood and Catherine Ingrassia, is owing in no small part to the existence of digitized databases that enable access to an astonishing range of materials available via Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), the British Periodicals database, and most importantly for this study, the Burney Collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, said to total nearly one million searchable pages, although those who have struggled with the failures of character recognition endemic to this database may wonder how ‘searchable’ it actually is. Contemporary newspapers have proven especially illuminating. The press historian Jeremy Black thought it probable in 1987 that ‘a stress on specificity is going to be one of the key developments in eighteenth-century historiography’, and it has certainly been a key to advancing my understanding of the nature and implications of Haywood’s political engagements, which are often tied to specific activities in the press.10 A few big ‘finds’ will be reported in what follows, but more important finally is the accumulation of new or reinterpreted circumstantial evidence as it permits inferences that can be used to build upon and to some degree reimagine the scanty ‘what-is-knowns’ of the life. This combination of inference and informed re-envisioning has made it possible to reassess Haywood in relation to historical contexts that have been only barely considered: pamphlet debates, the oppositional press at mid-century, Patriot politics from the 1730s onward, the Broad-Bottom opposition of 1742–4, the cult of the Patriot King and Bolingbrokean thought more generally and the Leicester House opposition of the later 1740s, to name only a few. Thus recontextualized, Haywood turns out to be a more adroit and better informed author than many have thought, as well as a productive figure for study of relations among the press, public opinion, political journalism, feminism and the emergence of the public sphere at mid-century. Haywood was the foremost female ‘author by profession’ of the first half of the eighteenth century and her achievements, especially in the 1740s and 1750s, utterly belie her reputation in some quarters for breathless prose and venal marketplace copycatting. Viewed through the lens of the political engagements reconstructed in this study, many of her works from this period stand as complex and sometimes brilliant works of the creative imagination. It seems unlikely that another full-scale biography will be attempted any time soon, although I would be happy to be proved wrong on this point, so I have included in A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood a good deal of information

Introduction

5

that is not strictly political, including details relating to her friendships with William Chetwood, Richard Savage, Aaron Hill, Henry Fielding and that relative latecomer on the biographical scene, William Hatchett. I have also tried to correct errors and misunderstandings that have taken root in the Haywood story. Blouch wrote in 1991: ‘Little is known about Haywood’s biography, and brief as it is, a good part of the received account has proved inaccurate’.11 Her pithy assessment remains about as true today as it was two decades ago, and in the interest of giving Haywood a less conjectural life I have attempted in the biographical prolegomenon to distinguish those parts of the received account that are undocumented, patently false or highly suspect from claims that can be shown to have some foundation in the historical record, although it should probably be added that any account, my own included, will require a great deal of inference and inevitably some degree of guesswork. Every biography is to some extent an argument and because this one is more contentious than many it seems a good idea to lay out some of its principal contestations. For starters, it seeks to dislodge the image of the ‘romance-writer loose of life and pen’ that has taken hold in many accounts and, in a closely related objective, to push critical imaginings beyond the preoccupation with the cultural ‘scandal’ of Haywood’s life and writings.12 If it remains largely the case that we know little, really, about the life, it is also true, and probably more damaging, that we think we know a great deal more than we do. The stories told about Haywood in even reputable sources often turn out to be driven not by evidence and analysis but by the desire to furnish her with a life commensurate with her significance as a cultural figure and her reputation for scandalous disregard for the proprieties. The sexual affair with the ‘dangerous’ poet Richard Savage, the two bastard children from the 1720s, the long-term sexual liaison with William Hatchett – these biographical ‘facts’ turn out to be no more than speculation, some of it fashioned out of the flimsiest of evidence, and they give a misleading picture of a life that seems, from some angles, not only short on sexual adventure but curiously indifferent to the claims of heterosexual attachment. It may be going too far to argue that Haywood’s life as a single mother who declines to remarry represents a challenge to heteronormativity, although a ‘queered’ view of Haywood is something I would like to see developed, but it can hardly be denied that her reputation as a ‘loose’ if not downright whorish woman rests to an uncomfortable extent on readings of her life filtered through the detractions of her enemies as they are abetted by present-day desires to give her an appealingly unconventional history. It is largely owing to that single image in The Dunciad of a fore-buttocked ‘Eliza’ with sagging breasts and ‘babes of love’ at her waist that she comes to us today fitted out with a sexually scandalous past and two illegitimate children, and is it sobering to say the least to consider that this image is the product of the inventive malice of Pope, fuelled by the enmity of his Grub

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Street tell-tale Savage and assembled out of details drawn from the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric conventions. In 1891, before Haywood’s present reputation for sexual licentiousness had taken solid shape, the DNB was careful to trace the origins of her ‘bad’ reputation to the reports of hostile observers and then hastened to supply the other side of the story. ‘Literary enemies’ – Pope and Savage, so far as I can tell – ‘represented that her character was bad, and that she had two illegitimate children’, but her ‘friends’ asserted she had been abandoned by her husband and was obliged to raise their children herself – and this, by the by, is the story as Haywood tells it in one of her letters.13 But it suits the kind of cultural histories that get fashioned today to regard Haywood as signifier for the ‘scandal’ of the emergence of the woman writer and of the early novel, and so it is often the disreputable elements that expand to fill the frame. A further example of the preference for ill-repute is found in a pair of biographical canards revolving around Haywood’s supposedly scandalous maternity. The first is the notion, introduced by Blouch as conjecture and taken up as fact by many since, that Haywood and Richard Savage were lovers and that in 1722 or 1723 he fathered the first of two illegitimate children.14 The second is that she had a second illegitimate child by William Hatchett, the actor, playwright, and pamphleteer often described in recent accounts as Haywood’s long-time companion. The first is possible if unlikely; the second wildly improbable, as will be seen in a later chapter. Baker in 1764, by comparison, is a model of judiciousness. He acknowledges her reputation for ‘Gallantry’ but adds the important qualification that he had heard no ‘particular Intrigues or Connections directly laid to her Charge’.15 More than can be said of any other literary figure from the period, the Haywood we know, or think we know, is constructed out of the malignity of her enemies and they turn out to be fewer in number than we had imagined. It is one goal of this biography to shift the emphasis away from repetition of overly familiar hostile representations to the study of her friendships, alliances and associations, and this change of focus can be so startling as to give the impression that one is encountering Haywood for the first time. At some conjunctures the image of Haywood the grimy Grub Street hack working solo disappears altogether and one glimpses instead a competent and respected professional pursuing her craft within a network of allies and associates. This biography also questions the entrenched view of Haywood as a ‘Tory’ or ‘Tory feminist’ who expressed her partisan sensibility, ideas and worldview as early as her first novel, Love in Excess (1719–20). The notion of the Tory Haywood seems to have originated with Ros Ballaster in Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (1992) who commented, almost in passing, that although Haywood failed to pursue the overt party political program of her Tory predecessors Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, she retained in her work the ‘over-arching structure of a Tory ideology’.16 Since then a small but rapidly

Introduction

7

growing contingent of critics has begun to insist that Haywood did write politically in her early amatory fiction and they are united in agreeing that she wrote as a Tory or, in a more extreme version, a Tory-Jacobite, and assume as a corollary that she campaigned against Sir Robert Walpole from the start. It is true that the first half of her career coincided with the rise and fall of Walpole as England’s first ‘prime minister’, to use the derisive phrase applied to the oftabused ‘Great Man’, and that from the mid-1730s she added her voice to that ‘long tirade’ against Walpole that ‘stands as the first example in British political history of an effective long-term propaganda campaign’.17 That said, I must say that Haywood’s ‘Toryness’ in the 1720s is less clear to me than it is to others and the anti-Walpole element in her early writing is unquestionably overstated. It is almost startling to discover that her public opposition to the Great Man is largely confined to a period of about a year, beginning with the (anonymous) publication of the anti-Walpole satire-romance Eovaai in the summer of 1736 and ending the following spring when her brief career as a player in Fielding’s politically edgy Great Mogul’s company at the Haymarket was brought to a close by Walpole’s Licensing Act. Haywood’s political positions were complex and shifting, to some degree situational; the desire to pin a political label on one or another text is understandable but reductive and tends towards the production of decontextualized readings that in my view create a distorted picture of the political life considered as a whole. The aim of this study is to develop the ‘long view’ urged by Juliette Merrit, who compellingly argues that ‘Haywood studies have arrived at a point at which we can begin to take the long view of her career and recognize that she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the course of nearly forty years as a professional writer’.18 To bring these preoccupations and strategies into focus I have found it necessary, with one major exception, to set aside the usual party political labels – the exception being the label ‘Jacobite’ which, as will be seen, presents a special set of difficulties that require particular examination. But those convenient but not very illuminating terms of opposition, ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’, will receive short shrift in what follows. It is the political argument of this book that from the mid-1730s until her death in 1756 Haywood engaged energetically and at times vehemently in antiministerial satire and journalism. In contrast to her one-time theatrical colleague Fielding, a self-described ‘strenuous advocate’ for the Pelham ministry in the 1740s who at different times wrote from different sides of the ministerial divide, Haywood consistently aligned herself with those excluded from or out of power. Her positioning in the 1720s is more problematic, however, for she plainly solicited support from government Whigs and, arguably, even wrote in support of Walpole in her scandal chronicle Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724). As far as I can tell, her anti-Walpole stance begins

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

only with Eovaai in 1736, and the politics of this strange text, a satiric Oriental seduction tale infused with fairy-tale romance, something of a sport in the oeuvre, are not well understood. Eovaai is certainly an attack on Walpole but, more interestingly in terms of the political engagements in the second half of her writing career, it is our first indication that Haywood, whether for pay or out of conviction, wrote on behalf of the Patriot propaganda campaign to foster support for the ‘people’s Prince’, Frederick Lewis, the Prince of Wales. My sense that Haywood cannot be easily consigned to any particular party has the support of that school of political history that stresses the subordination of party identities at mid-century to that variant of ‘Country’ ideology known as Patriotism, to adopt the terminology of newspaper historian Robert Harris. In A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (1993) and several related articles on the press and politics, Harris stresses the ‘mongrel nature’ of political alliances. Political manoeuvrings at mid-century were based on ‘complex alliances between Jacobites, Whigs, Patriots and Tories’ that inevitably blurred the ideological boundaries between these groups. In such an environment ‘people of apparently very different political persuasion came together, forming temporary alliances under the umbrella of the slippery language of patriotism and liberty’.19 My research suggests that Haywood is best understood in relation to this discursive Patriot mix. She can be shown to have had relations at different times with dissident Whigs, disaffected Tories, crypto-Jacobites and all-but-declared Jacobites and she was well known, it appears, to the organized opposition that had formed at Leicester House in the late 1740s and early 1750s. She herself wrote from a variety of political positions. In the months preceding the fall of Walpole and for several years after, she operated a pamphlet shop at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden that advertised a line of anti-ministerial wares. During the Fame years she ran a small-scale publishing business and saw into print works exhibiting a strongly oppositional bent. She seems to have been a supporter of the Broad-Bottom opposition of 1742–4. In early 1745 when many former members of the opposition found their way into the new coalition government, her Female Spectator received a telling endorsement from Jeffrey Broadbottom, spokesman of the outspokenly anti-ministerial paper Old England, or, The Constitutional Journal. She attacked the Duke of Cumberland at least once and may have been a paid propagandist for the party of his brother, the Prince of Wales. There is reason to suspect that Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), a work with many seeming Jacobite elements, was part of a coordinated effort organized on behalf of Leicester House by the oppositional journalist James Ralph under the direction of George Bubb Dodington. Sometimes she exhibits a kind of populist Tory-Jacobite radicalism associated with the City.20 Some passages of The Female Spectator sound very like the arguments of a Whig radical. To the extent that she is ‘Tory’, as many have argued, she seems

Introduction

9

to possess that eighteenth-century ‘Tory mind’ that J. G. A. Pocock characterizes as displaying ‘a strange blend of Jacobite and republican ideas’.21 Her work from perhaps the mid-1740s onwards expresses considerable sympathy for Jacobites and possibly for the Stuart cause, as others have argued, but her sympathies crossed partisan lines in ways that align her less with Jacobitism per se than with the Bolingbrokean ideal of a Patriot King capable of dissolving all distinctions of party and uniting the people around a monarch-father who would rule the country as if it were a patriarchal family. It is no great exaggeration to say that much of her work from Eovaai onwards, and perhaps earlier, meditates upon the implications for women of Bolingbroke’s ideas about public service. My assertion earlier that Haywood did not write in a party political way in the 1720s is not meant to imply indifference to the themes of power, domination, and control that are at their core political. Her amatory fictions from this decade share to the full the fascination shown by Bolingbroke in The Craftsman with the intoxicating nature of power. He wrote in The Craftsman, 13 June 1730, that the ‘Love of Power is natural; it is insatiable; almost constantly whetted, and never cloyed by Possession’. From this premise he argued for the necessity of a mixed and balanced government to hold in check man’s innate desire to exercise power. Haywood shared his views on balanced government, for many of the same reasons, but she was also deeply interested in the power dynamics of men – and women – in private life where, as the plots of the early amatory fictions repeatedly demonstrate, the sexual power of men over women is cloyed by possession. More than any other writer of her time she explores the effects of power-seeking on the powerless (and it should be noted that women in her analysis could be numbered among the power-hungry as well, as witness the aptly named Tigernipple in Eovaai.) In seduction-driven plots featuring the heterosexual pair, she lays bare abuses of power on one side (the chronically inconstant male) and thoughtless credulity and susceptibility to fantasy on the other (the too-credulous female). In romances, satires and political journalism from the mid-1730s onwards she uses the codes and conventions developed for the analysis of gendered power relations to take on an expanded range of social and political questions. From various angles she explores threats to what emerge in the long view as her core values – chief among them constancy, social justice and reason or the sceptical intelligence. It is as if what had begun as concentrated attention on gendered power dynamics is refocused to encompass the entire social order. Within this enlarged field of interest it is no longer the overly susceptible heroine who is under threat but rather the entire social order, a heroine writ large one might say, and it is an order which has come unmoored from its traditional values and is at chronic risk of seduction by the increasingly systemic corruptions of greed, passion and self-interest. Her amatory fictions had asked, what must credulous young women do to resist the allure of heteroromantic fantasy? How can they develop the intellectual and

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

emotional resources to resist male predation? What is the role of constancy in male-female relations? Of fantasy? Of reason? Her work from Eovaai onwards poses these same questions but transposes them, as it were, into a national and public register. What is the role of constancy in a modern economic order based increasingly on individualism and self-interest? What can be done to educate a too easily infatuated populace to resist the lies, enchantments, and misrepresentations of government power? How can human ‘parrots’ be convinced to think with their brains rather than their mouths? Her preoccupations are of a piece, from beginning to end of her career, and party political labels like Whig, Tory and Jacobite recede in importance when Haywood is contemplated within the feminist-inflected Enlightenment contexts that are reconstructed in some detail in this book. Haywood is rightly admired for her penetrating if somewhat cynical analyses of the skills needed by women to survive in a world that favours men in virtually every way. It is satisfying to discover that in addition she worked out for herself a vision of women’s productive role in national public life more richly imagined than I could have predicted before beginning this study. One of the shadowy professional relationships of which we catch intermittent glimpses in this biography is with James Ralph, the historian, political journalist and oppositional propagandist who was considered by his contemporaries to be a leading political writer. He co-edited The Champion with Fielding, wrote behind the pseudonym Jeffrey Broadbottom for Old England Journal and was later editor of The Remembrancer, the chief propaganda organ for the Leicester House opposition. These are all papers with which Haywood was in some fashion associated. Ralph was also one of the earliest professional writers to give serious thought to the phenomenon of the ‘author by profession’, a category that was beginning to take visible shape over the course of Haywood’s career. Two years after her death he published The Case of Authors by Profession (1758), a treatise that has been described as ‘the earliest comprehensive defense of the class’.22 Ralph divides professional authorship into ‘three Provinces’ or categories: an author may write for the booksellers, for the stage, or – the most interesting for our purposes here – for a political party, in his words, ‘a Faction in the Name of the Community’.23 That Haywood wrote for the booksellers and the stage is well known, but the likelihood that she also wrote for a political faction (or factions) represents a whole new way of thinking about her. Ralph described political writing as a demanding application of one’s writing talents, for it requires the author ‘do that without Doors’ – that is, outside Parliament – which ‘his Confederates in a superior Station, find impractible to do within … ’24 There is no smoking gun to establish that Haywood, like Ralph, wrote ‘without Doors’ on behalf of her parliamentary superiors, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence points in

Introduction

11

that direction, and her periodicals from the 1740s – The Female Spectator, The Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies – take on important new layers of meaning in the context of this possibility. With a few exceptions from a scattering of Haywood scholars, these periodicals have not been approached in a sustained way as ‘political’ works, that is, there has been little attempt to connect them to press activity or the specificities of ‘high’ politics at the parliamentary or ministerial level. They have been overlooked by historians of the political press generally and the Leicester House opposition more specifically. This neglect is not entirely surprising given Haywood’s reputation as an amatory novelist and the tendency of the ‘for-the-ladies’ titles to conceal political intent, but it will be seen that these works have significant points of contact with the wider press debate and their contents give reason to suspect that Haywood had ties with persons within or close to the parliamentary opposition. This preliminary investigation of her contributions to polemical activity and press debate at mid-century will I hope act as a stimulus to further historical study. The political life that follows begins with her earliest appearance on stage at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1714 and takes her through to her final major political work, the four-volume Invisible Spy published late in 1754. Five of the chapters provide close readings of key political texts within a variety of political, polemical and discursive contexts. These texts are Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724–5), Adventures of Eovaai (1736), The Female Spectator (1744–6), The Parrot (1746), Epistles to the Ladies (1748–50) and, in an epilogue, Invisible Spy (1754). Another chapter examines the 1749 pamphlet that got Haywood arrested, a Letter to H— G—g, Esq. (1749), as well as several other Jacobite-leaning works, including The Fortunate Foundlings (1744). Extensive close readings of imaginative texts may seem an odd modus operandi for a political biography but, in the case of an author whose political views are ill-understood and political engagements often misrecognized if not overlooked entirely, it seems a necessary method of proceeding. One benefit is the revelation, at least it came as such to me, that Haywood is an accomplished satirist who used established political symbol and metaphor to idiosyncratic but powerful effect. Many themes will emerge as the narrative develops, but two require some explanation here. The emphasis upon friendships and alliances mentioned earlier is part of a larger effort to offset the distortions induced by reliance on satire as a biographical source, but there are other historiographical issues to be considered. The fact that this eighteenth-century political biography is the biography of a woman poses a number of gender-related considerations or, to put it another way, the narrative shaped for this volume is inevitably an argument about how best to tell the story of a woman’s life. The models governing feminist literary

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

history often stress the individual woman writer in her quirky, often rebellious singularity or emphasize her identity within female communities or in relation to feminine literary counter-traditions. The feminocentric focus tends to restrict the range of questions we are prepared to ask about eighteenth-century women writers with the result, in this instance, that we know much less than we should about circles through which Haywood moved and the professional and political networks of which she was a part. Current interpretive models are often ill-equipped to deal with issues of social embeddedness and can be the equivalent of ham-fisted when it comes to thinking about women’s relationships with men within male-dominated cultural formations, such as the press at mid-century. But to understand Haywood as a political writer we simply must find ways to see her in relation to her male colleagues in the political press, even if the attempt to do so may feel at times like so much untheorized peering into the dark. The role of Jacobitism in Haywood’s writings is presently much debated and since my position is likely to dissatisfy some readers I want to say from the outset that, despite what looks to be considerable fellow-feeling for the Jacobites and their families, I believe Haywood’s support for the Stuart cause has been overstated. David Oakleaf cautions that ‘oppositional political sympathies are ambiguous’ and reminds students of Haywood that we must ask of her as we do of Pope or Johnson, ‘What was the nature and extent of her Jacobite sympathy?’ – and, most importantly, we ‘should expect complex answers’.25 One part of that complex answer is that Haywood used idealized Jacobite counterworlds to imaginatively enshrine values (loyalty, hospitality, constancy, steadfastness, sacrifice) threatened under conditions of modernity as persuasively described by J. G. A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment. Closely related to this imaginative Jacobitism is an ongoing preoccupation with issues of social justice linked in Haywood’s texts with a succession of ‘Astrea’ figures. Astrea is important in Jacobite mythology as the goddess of justice who returns to earth to review its wickedness and in Haywood’s usage, especially in Epistles for the Ladies, she embodies the idea of a Machiavellian ritorno to justice, patriotism, and public virtue under the influence of ‘the ladies’. For Haywood Jacobitism is not so much a political cause as a vehicle of critique and an imaginative resource for her Patriot feminism. The first chapter, ‘Her Approach to Fame’, focuses on the unfolding of her public life and political commitments as Haywood becomes by degrees an ‘author by profession’ who pursues fame in a variety of forms. This chapter offers an appraisal of her politics in the 1720s that challenges the usual understanding of Haywood as a Tory and anti-Walpole writer, traces her transition from aspiring actress to London coterie poet to innovative novelist to multifaceted market-

Introduction

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place professional, and revisits her fraught relationships with the Hillarians, including Savage, Martha Sansom and of course Aaron Hill. Chapter 2 looks closely at her major political work from the 1720s, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, arguing that this fascinating and understudied roman à clef is a satire on England in the age of the financial revolution that (among other things) responds to two national financial crises, the well-known bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which forms the allegorical framework of Part 1, and the Macclesfield scandal that rocked the country in 1725 even as she was composing Part 2, which is one of many stories used to illustrate national corruptions in the aftermath of the Bubble. The moral indignation, sensationalism, and ‘ripped from the headlines’ contemporaneity of this scandal chronicle is read as part of Haywood’s ‘tabloidizing’ imagination. Chapters 3 and 4 take up the Haywood story in the 1730s which means reassessing her life in the theatre. ‘The Theatrical Thirties’ reconsiders her return to the stage in 1729 in light of the boom in London theatre following the unprecedented success of The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and reconstructs her relationships with two of her theatrical colleagues at the Haymarket in the 1730s, William Hatchett and Henry Fielding. Her relationship with Fielding, to take the better known of the two, was far from being the antagonistic ‘war’ that some have imagined, while her relations with Hatchett, who is often described these days as her lover and domestic partner, turns out to be more puzzling than existing accounts would suggest. The idea that Haywood was his ‘mistress’, as is often said, strikes me as unlikely, indeed preposterous, but I hasten to add that the evidence is ambiguous and I will do my best to lay it out fairly. This chapter also looks at the roles Haywood is known to have performed on stage, something that oddly enough is seldom attempted, and finds that she was a deliciously outrageous figure on stage, romping and raunchy. This chapter is followed by a close and multiply contextualized reading of The Adventures of Eovaai, which argues that this Oriental satire-romance represents Haywood’s first outing as a Patriot feminist writer. Chapter 5, ‘At the Sign of Fame, 1741-1744’, presents new information about Haywood’s publishing venture at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden, an upmarket glass-fronted pamphlet shop where she sold oppositional wares, some published over her own imprint, and offers a ‘thick’ description of the neighbourhood where Haywood lived for over three years. It uses visual evidence to speculate about the sign suspended above the door which (I believe) featured the iconic figure of Fama or Fame blowing a trumpet announcing the triumph of Patriot virtue over ministerial corruption. This sign, which I argue is reproduced in miniature in the frontispiece to the present volume, is one of the many authorial self-representations that Haywood held out before her public and offers another example of her immersion in Patriot oppositional culture.

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 take up her major journalistic texts from the second half of the 1740s, The Female Spectator, The Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies, works often linked in advertisements and on title pages. These chapters use a combination of close reading and contextual analysis to place Haywood in relation to parliamentary politics. It will be seen that each work has links with arguments and commentary in the oppositional press and that The Female Spectator, despite its address to the ladies and its multiple professions of gentility, shows signs of radical populism. It was followed by The Parrot, a weekly paper of Jacobite tendency which was shut down after only nine numbers and suggests the risky path Haywood trod at this time. One of its numbers contains a bitterly satiric portrait of the Duke of Cumberland as a mangler of flies. Close readings of the political subtexts of Epistles for the Ladies deepen the picture of Haywood’s political connections. There are links with the propaganda efforts connected with such oppositional figures as Dodington and Ralph at Leicester House and ultimately, perhaps, the Prince of Wales himself, and there are suggestions as well of connections with the world of City radical Whig opposition via one of her collaborators on Epistles for the Ladies, Richard Glover, and with the Tory-Jacobite opposition through the Welsh MP Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. Her political journalism raises questions not easily answered about Haywood’s motivations and the issue of political backing. Was Haywood working for her bookseller or for sponsors? Was she a hired gun or did she write out of personal conviction – or both? Did she undertake to write these papers on her own or did she function basically as an editor seeking contributions? Chapter 9, ‘Was Haywood a Jacobite?’ contextualizes the Jacobitism so evident in many of the writings of the late 1740s in relation to the demoralization of the opposition and the dual-dynastied cult of a Patriot King that flourished at the end of the decade. The volume concludes with an Epilogue that focuses on Haywood’s self-inscriptions in her last and most selfreflexive political text, the seldom discussed Invisible Spy, written after the death of Frederick. She appears in this instance to write as an outraged Tory in the furore over the Jew Bill in 1753-4 and continues her needling campaign against Henry Fielding. Like many ambitious projects this one began in high-spirited confidence. Although it seems laughable now, once long ago I envisioned this volume as a definitive reappraisal of Haywood’s political writings and career. Questions would remain certainly, but the searching assessment of the politics many have called for would be accomplished and the groundwork for the much-needed comprehensive and reliable life-and-works would be in place. If I am being fully honest, I saw myself as the scourge of ill-founded speculation who would set many misunderstandings aright and, in the words of the Female Spectator, I looked forward to razing the ‘massive Buildings erected by Enchantment’.

Introduction

15

The experience of writing A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood has been chastening, not least because I have been obliged to engage in a fair amount of speculation and guesswork myself, especially in areas where others more trained than I in both the broad sweep and the particulars of political history will detect arguments ‘erected by Enchantment’ requiring correction. And, of course, much remains to be done. Some will notice the omission of discussion of The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1726) and others will regret that much attention has been given to a few key texts when a broader survey of her political thought might have been in order. Her work in relation to the Freemasons, the Jew Bill, the Elizabeth Canning episode; the political implications of her many translations; the specificities of her political engagements in the 1720s outside Memoirs of a Certain Island – these are only a few topics all but passed over in this study. If there is one thing of which I am certain as a result of preparing this biography it is that, despite a number of very smart studies of individual texts, the study of Haywood’s career as a whole is still in its early days and many more studies like this one will be required before we can confidently take the long view of her life, texts, career and politics.

Page Intentionally Left Blank

1 ‘HER APPROACH TO FAME’: 1714–29

Most accounts of Haywood in the 1720s stress her sexual alliances or the cultural scandal of her earliest fiction, but the more compelling story is of a young woman’s journey towards literary professionalism and ultimately oppositional political engagement. Haywood began her public life ambitious for fame – as an actress first, and then perhaps as a coterie poet – but she found popular acclaim, almost by surprise it would seem, as a ‘best-selling’ novelist. Very soon she was writing as an ‘author by profession’ and by the end of the decade had developed the shrewd marketing practices that would serve her throughout her career. Her politics in the 1720s are not easily pegged, however. Her novels were not exactly written ‘outside the context of party politics and patronage’, as some have thought, but neither did she write as a Tory partisan.1 Dedications, panegyrical passages and records of friendships point instead toward a quest for protection and support from sometimes unexpected quarters. This chapter (and the next) will consider evidence for her partisan alignments and will conclude, with some reservations, that Haywood is probably best described as an opportunist by necessity in this phase of her career. But this is not to say that she lacked political principles or convictions. Even in the 1720s she was drawn to political themes to which she would return for the rest of her career, many of them concerned with social justice and truth-telling. For this period there exists a relative wealth of information regarding her personal experiences and even, if some speculation is granted, her inner life. This is the time of her infamous squabbles with Martha Sansom (née Fowke) and the toxic falling-out with former intimate and soon-to-be enemy, Richard Savage. Haywood did something she would seldom if ever do again, she took her wounded feelings into print, retelling the story of her disdain for Sansom and Savage and her victimization by them (as she saw it) in prefaces, dedications, self-inscriptions and allegorized fictions. She even invented for her purposes a retaliatory ‘revenge’ subgenre of the amatory novella that enabled her to continue punishing the pair in one encrypted roman-à-clef story after another. By the end of the decade she seems to have cured herself of this proclivity for airing her grievances in public and would thereafter maintain the practised reticence so often remarked nowadays, but during this emotionally tempestuous period she would – 17 –

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

many times vent her wounded feelings in self-inscribed writings. As a result, there is much in print bearing upon her feelings about Savage, Sansom and Aaron Hill, the other figure in the psychosexual Hillarian tangle. The self-reflexive writings she composed are ripe for further biographical investigation, and they may be just the materials needed to dispel the earlier fear that biographers may never find a route to ‘her “sensibility”, her responses to experiences and to life’.2 This chapter and the next, which focuses on Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724–5), trace her journey in the 1720s toward a multifaceted role as an ‘author by profession’. The popular success of Love in Excess seemed to point towards a career supplying the racy but ‘polite’ fictions that would attract buyers in the fashionable novels-and-translations segment of the market. But there were signs early on that she was restive with such a limited role and wanted to expand her scope, purpose, and authorial identity beyond the ‘Novel kind of Writing’ that came so easily to her, even if that meant embracing less respectable dimensions of authorship.3 She wanted to occupy new generic territories and expand her range as a chronicler of contemporary life. With the publication of Memoirs of a Certain Island in September of 1724 she basically reinvented herself. Memoirs is often represented as a dive to the bottom – ‘It is hard to imagine any depths to which Haywood will not sink in her prose scandal chronicles’, writes one especially hostile modern critic – and there is no denying the sheer nastiness of the attacks Haywood contrives for her scandal chronicles.4 But scandal writing, I will argue in the chapter that follows, also represents an advance in her satiric methods and a considerable widening of her sense of social purpose. The present chapter attends to the beginnings of her career when she sought recognition on stage and as a poet of the sublime and then found fame as the author of that surprise ‘hit’ of 1719, Love in Excess. By the end of the 1720s she had consolidated her identity as a thoroughgoing businesswoman coolly overseeing a number of well-established literary product lines, some published under her name and others anonymously, some with winking hints for the cognoscenti.

‘An Inclination for the Stage’ Haywood began her professional life at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in 1714. She was perhaps twenty-one.5 She would return to various playhouses on and off for more than two decades, and critics are beginning to look at the way even her prose fictions are conceived in theatrical terms.6 She would later declare her family ‘averse’ to her theatrical ambitions, which is hardly surprising given the times and the possibility of a mercantile family background, but she managed somehow – and that she did so seems a testimony to the potency of her ambitions – to make her way across the Irish Sea to the capital city to serve an apprenticeship as an actress. Dublin was a lively town of 100,000 and Smock Alley, its only pro-

‘Her Approach to Fame’

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fessional playhouse, was the chief ‘feeder’ for the London professional theatres. Actors who had the good fortune to find a berth there would be trained by the septuagenarian but still impressive manager Joseph Ashbury, by all accounts the foremost acting teacher of the day. Haywood’s first role, and unfortunately the only role for which records have survived, was the bit part of Chloe in Shadwell’s adaptation of Timon of Athens. This confirms that she was there as a novice to learn her craft. Chloe mostly stands around on stage, now and then delivering a line of little import such as ‘Madam! Your father is come in’. Twenty-one men and eleven women are known to have been part of the acting company at the start of the 1714–15 season. Haywood was one of three novices. Others arriving at this time included Francis Elrington, the younger brother of the renowned tragedian and Smock Alley manager Thomas Elrington, and, in December, William Wilks, nephew of Robert Wilks, another product of Ashbury’s training.7 Ashbury’s assistant that season, interestingly, was the man who would be Haywood’s first publisher, William Rufus Chetwood. Due to the spottiness of the Smock Alley records we know nothing about her remaining years there. She debuted on the London stage on 23 April 1717 at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and her arrival received some splash. One of the papers heralded a new actress on the scene, a ‘Mrs Haywood’ ‘lately arriv’d from Ireland’.8 She had come a long way from the Chloe days. Her debut role was the Countess of Nottingham in John Banks’s tragedy The Unhappy Favourite: or, the Earl of Essex opposite an associate from the Dublin days, the actor Thomas Elrington, a Smock Alley manager who between 1715 and 1719 divided his time between Dublin and London.9 Nottingham was an ‘actressy’ role that Haywood would surely have relished, a passionate revenge-seeking woman said to possess ‘malicious Beauty’ and ‘wondrous’ wit in the invention of wicked plots. She is on from the start – it seems right she would have the first line, ‘Help me to rail’ – and delivers speeches that might be at home in one of Haywood’s female-revenge tales: give me ‘some new strange Curse that’s far above / Weak Womans Rage to blast the Man I love’.10 Accounts today sometimes give the impression that she achieved notoriety early on as a stage performer but she seems to have fizzled in her debut, or so we infer from the fact she would not get another part until 1723 when she assumed the leading role in her own A Wife to be Lett, a part she appears to have written for herself. A Wife to be Lett, Haywood’s only comedy, was the last play to be staged as part of an experimental summer season at Drury Lane managed by the twentyyear-old Theophilus Cibber. Richard Savage had a play staged that summer as well. Despite opening in a stiflingly hot week in August, it was to be her most successful play and she performed the lead role of Mrs Graspall three consecutive afternoons, Monday through Wednesday, 12–14 August.11 The story announced in the press was that Haywood undertook the role at the last minute due to ‘the Indisposition of an Actress’,12 but I am not the first to suspect that she engineered

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

the fiction of the indisposed actress in order to cast herself as a replacement for a role she had intended for herself from the start, and it is worth noting that the part of Mrs Graspall is huge and it would have required time to learn the lines. The prologue, spoken by young Cibber, plays upon Haywood’s literary reputation as a forceful novelist who writes with ‘manly Vigour, and with Woman’s wit’. She now takes the stage as a ‘dangerous Woman-Poet’ and critics in the audience would do well to tremble: ‘Criticks! be dumb to-night – no Skill display; A dangerous Woman-Poet wrote the Play: … Measure her Force, by her known Novels, writ With manly Vigour, and with Woman’s wit. Then tremble, and depend, if ye beset her, She, who can talk so well, may act yet better.13

The epilogue was spoken by Haywood. Two years later when Haywood sought to have the play revived she contrived to have ‘Mrs Graspal’ make an appeal to the manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane from within the pages of Mist’s Weekly Journal: ‘Mrs. Graspal, who has been our Customer 2 years desires us to inform the Manager of Drury-Lane Play-House, that if they pleased to play the Comedy, called, A Wife to be Lett, within ten Days, they will oblige her and a great many of the Quality to whom she communicates her Design’.14 Despite her efforts the comedy remained unperformed in London until much later, although it was performed in Norwich in the late thirties.15 It would be another seven years before Haywood would appear on stage again and then it would be in another substantial part that appears to have been written specifically for her, this one by her friend, literary collaborator and possibly lover William Hatchett. Her role as Briseis in Hatchett’s The Rival Father, staged at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket in 1730, is discussed in a later chapter. All this is to say that the stage held powerful attractions for Haywood. Savage’s sneer in his satire The Authors of the Town (1725) that Haywood panted ‘for Stage-Renown’ might be discounted as the usual Savage nastiness, but Baker corroborates the underlying idea when he notes in more tempered language that she had ‘an Inclination for the Stage as a Performer’.16 It is suggestive to say the least that she betook herself to Dublin against the wishes of her family to undertake a course of study at the Smock Alley Theatre that amounted to an apprenticeship as a professional actress. In this light, even her efforts as a playwright can be interpreted as an attempt to get herself in front of an audience. If anything, criticism to date may have underplayed the extent to which she sought to achieve fame as an actress.

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Richard Savage The Savage so contemptuous of Haywood’s ‘panting’ stage ambitions is of course that same poet, aristocrat manqué, and Johnsonian biographical subject who at an earlier stage of Haywood’s career publically declared himself one of her literary admirers, writing verses in praise of two of her early novels. In the latest wave of rehearsals of the Haywood life story he is sometimes said to have lived with her and more often named as the father of at least one of the illegitimate children assigned to her by the Pope tradition.17 It is not necessary to subscribe to the ‘Savage love’ hypothesis, which I have challenged elsewhere, to recognize that the disintegration of their intimacy, whatever its nature, was a crucial event in Haywood’s personal and professional life that ended up playing a huge role in shaping her modern reputation for scandalous maternity and sexual licentiousness.18 Scholars agree that it was almost certainly Savage who supplied Pope with the gossipy Grub Street particulars that made their way into The Dunciad, among them one presumes the innuendo about the ‘babes of love’ that has given rise to much ill-founded speculation. This is not the place to attempt a full accounting of the Haywood-Savage relation, but the story as presently told stands in need of correction so it is worth pausing to try to put their relation in a truer light. The beginning of their friendship is usually dated to sometime in 1719, after she published Part 1 of Love in Excess in January, but before June when Part 2 appeared graced with a puff from Savage. The reasoning is that if he had known her earlier he would have written commendatory lines for Part 1, but the fact that he did not do so proves nothing. Savage by all accounts was an insistently self-regarding writer always inclined to use others to serve his own ends. When Part 1 was published Haywood was a first-time author without a name – indeed, Part 1 was issued anonymously – and Savage had little to gain by attaching himself to Love in Excess. He waited, characteristically, until she already achieved éclat. (Verses written for her novel The Rash Resolve in 1724 suggest he was less than thrilled by her subsequent success: the commendation begins with this sulky couplet: ‘Doom’d to a Fate, which damps the Poet’s Flame, / A Muse, unfriended, greets thy rising Name!’).19 They may have met as early as spring 1717 when she arrived from Dublin for her London stage debut, for they had theatre friends in common, many of them Smock Alley actors now associated with John Rich’s newly constituted company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Rich had drawn away so many from the Dublin company that by spring 1715 Smock Alley ‘had been thoroughly decimated’.20 One of those friends was William Chetwood, the author, publisher and general man-about-theatre who had assisted Ashbury at Smock Alley during the 1714–15 season when Haywood first arrived. He and Haywood were certainly known to each other from the Dublin days. Chetwood, who generally features in theatre histories as prompter at the Theatre Royal at

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Drury Lane, may have been associated during the 1718–19 season with the theatre at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.21 It was Chetwood of course who published her first novel (as well as several others in the early 1720s) and it was he who provided Love in Excess with its dedicatee (the celebrated actress Anne Oldfield) and wrote for Part 1 a dedication remarkable for its astonishing picture of the firsttime author as trembling ingénue, a ‘young Lady’ who is above all things ‘fearful in not pleasing’ the ‘Patroness I have chose her’.22 It was the last time Haywood would allow anyone to speak for her. Haywood’s biographers seem unaware that Savage was on friendly terms with Chetwood by at least 1718. Savage was a young man of perhaps twenty, still unknown, a habitué of London theatrical circles and possessor of literary aspirations. It has gone largely unnoticed that one of his earliest printed works was an anonymously published memoir of the Irish actor and Ashbury product Theophilus Keene that was brought out by Chetwood.23 It included verses by another from the Smock Alley cohort, William Wilks. For what it is worth, at around this time Savage was courting Haywood’s ‘Patroness’, the actress Anne Oldfield, as his own patron.24 By at least 1718, then, Haywood and Savage moved through the same theatrical and book trade circles; by 1719 they shared a publisher and may have shared Jacobite sympathies.25 It seems almost impossible they were not companions prior to the publication of Love in Excess in 1719. Haywood and Savage would seem natural allies. They were young, poetically inclined, ambitious, undeniably clever, strongly attracted to the world of the theatre and happy to cultivate a raffish image. Savage, barely out of his teens, saw his play Love in a Veil performed for four nights in June and July of 1718 at Drury Lane. Haywood was his senior by a few years, but all his life Savage sought connections with older women, especially those in a position to advance his literary and social ambitions, and for her part, Haywood will turn up again in the company of theatrical men who are her juniors, including two important figures from the 1730s, Hatchett and Fielding. There is some reason to suspect that Savage and Haywood had been literary collaborators in the late teens. Savage’s biographer Richard Holmes has called attention to a 1720 manuscript collection of twenty fashionable songs that includes eleven by Savage, which he rightly describes as ‘curiously violent statements of sexual passion’.26 Some of these songs might easily be mistaken for lyrical passages in Love in Excess from this same period. As for Haywood, surviving poetry by and about her indicates that she was circulating work in manuscript by 1718. A poem by Jane Brereton dated 1718, though published much later, glances with disapprobation at her ‘soft seducing Style’, indicating that even before the career-defining success of Love in Excess in 1719 her daringly erotic style was raising eyebrows. Was it an early version of her first novel that was making the rounds? Or perhaps some of her poetry? Brereton says only that her seductive writings might ‘beguile’ ‘heedless Youth and

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Innocence’.27 Early in 1719 Haywood would of course begin to demonstrate that genius for ‘the Novel kind of Writing’ that would be remarked by so many of her contemporaries, and with a single work in three instalments she would initiate the vogue for amatory fiction that Daniel Defoe complained about in the preface to Moll Flanders (1722) when he decried the ‘Novels and Romances’ with which the ‘World is so taken up of late’.28 Haywood tells the story of her debut as a novelist in a well-known letter from 1720: ‘The Stage not answering my Expectation, and the averseness of my Relations to it; has made me Turn my Genius another Way; I have Printed some Little things Which have mett with a better Reception than they Deservd, or I Expected’.29 The first of these ‘Little things’ – Part 1 of Love in Excess, announced in the Evening Post on 22 January 1719 as ‘This Day’ published – quickly established Haywood as a force to be reckoned with. In the early 1720s notices of new works by ‘Mrs Haywood’ were everywhere in the papers and it was not long before she dominated completely the market for novels. Love in Excess would eventually go through six editions over a twentythree-year period, according to Spedding, and it would remain in print for most of her lifetime, serving as her signature work in friendly accounts, such as this from Chetwood in 1749: ‘As the Pen is her chief Means of Subsistence, the World may find many Books of her Writing, tho’ none have met with more Success than her Novels, more particularly her Love in Excess’.30 As late as 1764 this novel was said to embody ‘perfect knowledge of the affections of the human heart’.31 Influential critics such as William Warner heavily emphasize the ‘scandal’ of the early novel, more specifically the novel of amatory intrigue that was Haywood’s bread-and-butter speciality. He is right to locate amatory writing at the leading edge of a literary culture undergoing rapid transformation, but it is not so easy as critical accounts would lead one to believe to find evidence for condemnation of amatory writing from the 1720s – certainly there is little that rises to the level of outrage or anger implied by the word ‘scandal’. Haywood’s experiments in the amatory arena met with great praise and, more interestingly perhaps, acknowledgement of her unsettling powers. Derogations of the ‘scandalous’ women writers assumed to refer to Haywood – Penelope Aubin’s sniff y reference to ‘other female Authors my Contemporaries, whose Lives and Writings have, I fear, too great a resemblance’, for example – could apply to other women writers, Manley, for example, who was still alive, or Haywood’s object of detestation Martha Sansom, although the characterization of their style as ‘careless and loose’ does sound like Haywood.32 For decades to come contemporaries who wished to promote her work or emphasize esteem for Haywood routinely invoked Love in Excess, as if this title summarized all that was most praiseworthy about its author. It seems to have been the basis for Fielding’s good-humoured send up of ‘Mrs Novel’ in the Author’s Farce and it continued to be reprinted throughout Haywood’s lifetime.

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

With Love in Excess she began to attract positive attention as an edgy, excitingly modern kind of writer. The commendatory verses accompanying her early works were a cut or two above the usual puffs, not the expected doggerel at all, in fact, but in many cases thoughtful attempts to engage the Haywood phenomenon and take its measure. They tend to stress the ‘warm’, ‘soft’, as we might say, the erotic and lyrical tendencies of her prose. One interesting but often overlooked source is from the still unidentified Ma A (she calls herself a ‘Young Lady’) who in 1724 dedicated her novel The Prude to ‘the Incomparable Haywood’. The dedication includes a sympathetic and thoughtful assessment of Haywood that anticipates the modern critic Gabrielle Starr in finding Haywood remarkable for her innovative creation of ‘affective consensus’ or ‘shared sensibility’.33 Ma A describes Haywood’s easy flowing style as being capable of rousing even dull minds to new pleasures or generous pity and likened her to Orpheus in being able to stir even stones into life and bring gentleness to the brutes. This sense of Haywood as a modern Orpheus calling forth and affirming new modes of feeling, an advocate and inspiration for what we would call affect or sensibility, suffuses a number of other early verses. The tribute from James Sterling is known for its celebration of the ‘fair Triumvirate of Wit’ – the well-known trio consisting of Behn, Manley, and Haywood – and its image of Haywood as the ‘Great Arbitress of Passion!’, but his verses are interesting as a comment on her power over bodily response. She resides high above, like the moon, but exerts her force on the spirits that ebb and flow under her lunar-like influence: breasts throb and eyes water. The effect on the reader is matched by the process undergone by the characters in what amounts to a process of ethical refinement: the characters undergo trials like gold in the furnace and emerge shiny and ‘pure as tortur’d Gold’ – an image of ‘rewarded Vertue’ that combines purity and torture in an image that may suggest something about the startling effects Haywood was able to achieve in her treatments of love and sex.34 These contemporaries, male and female, grant Haywood an unprecedented power to break through internal restraint and external prohibition, or as Savage puts it: ‘What Beauty ne’er cou’d melt, thy Touches fire’. Her ‘Soul-thrilling Accents’ wound the senses and ‘strike with softness, whilst they Charm with sound!’35 She was a cultural force, all right, but scandal seems not exactly the right word for it. One gets the sense that young women and men may have found in her fictions a kind of generational protest against the proprieties of their elders, that what seemed scandalous about the amatory novel was the way it offered a rising generation of young men and women a way to affirm the passions and impulses of youth, to affirm feelings in excess in defiance of an older generation of readers of high-minded, idealistic and now out-of-date heroic romances. Following the success of Love in Excess Chetwood continued to lend his support to various Haywood projects. He would collect subscriptions for her

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second work Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1720) in his Covent Garden shop and would publish several more of her early works. Chetwood figures in Book II of The Dunciad as one of two booksellers, Curll being the other, who would compete in the notorious pissing contest for the prize of a vacantly smiling, sexually compliant ‘Eliza’. Chetwood would look back on the episode with amusement: ‘she need not blush’, he would say of Haywood’s role in The Dunciad, ‘in such good Company’.36 Blouch’s speculation that Haywood may have had an illegitimate child by a bookseller has been widely bruited in the years since she advanced it and the mantle has fallen to Hatchett, but if there is any truth to the affair with a bookseller, then Chetwood strikes me as the better candidate.37 Hatchett was many things – fringe actor, translator, playwright, pamphleteer and Haywood’s literary collaborator from the 1730s onward – but never a bookseller. Chetwood, on the other hand, was definitely on the scene in the early 1720s and closely involved with Haywood in professional matters. He is another intriguing and understudied figure in the Haywood story.

A Tory Author? The once orthodox belief that Haywood’s earliest work represents a retreat from politics has been contested in feminist arguments that replace that dubious assessment with the mistaken notion that she wrote as a Tory ideologue.38 The Tory idea seems to have originated with Ros Ballaster who asserted in Seductive Forms (1992), almost in passing, that the amatory fictions retain the ‘overarching structure of a Tory ideology’, an observation endlessly repeated but seldom critically examined.39 It is not always self-evident what ‘Tory’ means in some discussions and in any case the formulation, if true enough, fails to lend itself to precise analysis. Review of Haywood’s professional associations and patronageseeking activities in the 1720s suggests that thinking about the ‘Tory’ Haywood is due for reappraisal. She may look and sound at times like a Tory but she often looks and sounds like a Whig. Consider, for example, Love in Excess, a novel for which strong Tory claims have been made. Toni Bowers, as part of a discussion of a pattern of ‘collusive resistance’ which she reads as expressive of Tory frustrations and compromise, has gone so far as to assert that Love in Excess ‘functioned in its day as a powerful work of Tory partisan polemic’.40 Considerable circumstantial evidence tells against this reading, however, starting with the publisher. Chetwood was an author and bookseller of decidedly Whiggish stripe. A few years later he would write and publish an adventure novel with the title The Voyages of Captain Robert Boyle, which is significant in that Boyle’s name was a byword not only for the new science but also for any and all things Whiggish.41 Chetwood’s book shop in Covent Garden bore the sign of Cato’s Head – Cato, defender of Roman liberties,

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

was of course a Whig hero – which means that advertisements directed potential buyers of Love in Excess to a shop marked by the image of a Whig icon. A glance at the novel’s front matter would show that it was dedicated to Anne Oldfield, the Whig actress famed for a moving performance in Addison’s classical tragedy Cato (1713) as well as for her well-publicized intimacies with such Whig stalwarts as Arthur Mainwaring, confidential secretary to the Duchess of Marlborough, and Charles Churchill. She is an odd choice, surely, to be the dedicatee of a piece of Tory partisan writing, and even allowing for the fact that the dedication is signed by the bookseller rather than the author, it is still a peculiar Tory polemic that would come into the world bearing such flags of Whig approval. Further complicating the Tory hypothesis is the politically heterodox nature of Haywood’s friendships in the 1720s, starting with the decidedly Whiggish tendency of one of the circles in which she was said to have moved, the group centred on the society seer Duncan Campbell. In Secret Memoirs of the late Mr Duncan Campbel (1732), Campbell names her as one of the company of ‘celebrated Wits’ who made his house a ‘general Rendezvous’. The circle included a number of political Whigs, among them the strongly pro-Hanoverian playwright Susannah Centlivre and pro-government propagandist Phillip Horneck, although Spedding is right to question the value of this information on the grounds that Campbell appears to be engaging in name-dropping in this account.42 Stronger evidence comes from her association with the ‘Hillarians’, a politically mixed group of writers and artists committed to a progressive programme of ameliorating ‘politeness’ with which Haywood seems to have identified.43 This cultural ‘Whiggism’ need not imply a particular party political stance but it does nothing to enhance her standing as a Tory. Neither does her choice of Whig essayist and MP Sir Richard Steele as dedicatee for The Surprize (1724): ‘You, Sir, teach us how to Think, as well as Act; and by inspiring us with just and noble Sentiments, render it impossible to behave in a manner contrary to them’.44 But on the other side of the political spectrum is her intense friendship with crypto-Jacobite Richard Savage, and the pair seems to have shared Stuart sympathies. The motto to Love in Excess comes from lines by George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, a Jacobite suspected of complicity in the 1715 uprising. That same year, Savage dedicated the printed version of Love in a Veil to Lansdowne as well; earlier he had written verses sympathetic to the Jacobite cause in 1715 including ‘An Ironical Panegryick on his Pretended Majesty G----’ and ‘The Pretender’. In addition, and it is unclear how far to push this, she appears to have had a relationship of some sort with the leading Jacobite publisher at this time, Nathaniel Mist, recognized by historians as ‘a key figure in the coordination of Jacobite policy’.45 When she sought to drum up support for a revival of her comedy A Wife to be Lett in November 1725 she chose the Jacobite Mist’s Weekly Journal as the channel for the appeal to the Drury Lane manager that we saw earlier. As later chapters will

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show, almost from the start her writings suggest Jacobite sympathies, although (as will be seen) it is by no means clear whether they express pro-Stuart feeling or furnish a language of protest against the modernist values of her society. Going strictly by the evidence of her known associations in the first half of the 1720s, Haywood is perhaps best described as non-partisan, and this should come as no surprise. A professional writer, even one with a popular following, could not rely upon the marketplace alone for a livelihood. She would have required the additional support of ‘friends’, patrons and protectors who could supply the ten guineas or so that a dedication could be expected to bring. A professional writer was denied the luxury of politically pure positions or the pleasure of taunting the powers that be, to say nothing of the outright dangers of taking Jacobite positions. (The small-fry Jacobite conspirator Christopher Layer was executed for his Stuart enthusiasms in 1723). Haywood naturally ‘looked in all directions for advancement’, to use words applied to Hogarth in the 1720s, and was obliged like him to ‘juggle loyalties’.46 As a dependent writer she cast about for financial support wherever it might be found, and in the early 1720s – although Haywood’s admirers might not much like it – a great deal of that support would have come from government Whigs associated with Walpole. George Bubb Dodington, one of the lords of the Treasury from 1724, subscribed to her second publication, Letters from a Lady of Quality (1721), and it will be seen in the next chapter that she lavished praise on him and a number of other Whig courtiers and politicians, including Walpole himself, in Memoirs of a Certain Island. She dedicated Fair Captive (1721) to Viscount Thomas Gage, an MP from 1717 who supported Walpole up to the Excise Bill. She dedicated The Fatal Secret to William Yonge shortly after he was named Commissioner of the Treasury in 1724, a post he held until 1727. The political significance of these dedications looms larger when it is recalled that both Gage and Yonge ‘were attacked by Pope and other poets as ‘“dunces of state”, toadies of Walpole’, according to Backscheider; these and other Whig-directed dedications expose the ‘roots of some of Pope’s antipathy toward Haywood’.47 Pope’s antipathy is a complicated matter, of course, but no account of Haywood’s political orientation in the 1720s can afford to ignore the implications of her oft-cited turn in The Dunciad. J. A. Downie observes, in fact, that the satire ‘chronicles the system of government patronage under Walpole, as in one form or another the vast majority of the dunces were its beneficiaries’.48 Her status as a prize in the milling crowd of Walpole-affiliated dunces does nothing to shore up her Tory credentials.

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

The Making of an ‘Author by Profession’ Haywood’s emergence as a full-fledged author by profession is connected to a crucial event in her personal and professional life, the publication in September 1724 of the scandal chronicle Memoirs of a Certain Island. By virtue of its detailed, highly specific assaults on a broad swathe of living people, some close to Haywood, this anonymously published chronicle managed to anger for different reasons and to different degrees quite a number of her contemporaries, including some erstwhile friends. Pope’s irritation is well known. In Book 2 of The Dunciad he created the memorably disgusting image of a woman with swollen ‘cow-like’ udders and two ‘babes of love’ at her waist. The ‘babes of love’ are often taken to refer to actual children, but the image works just as well as a reflection upon her illegitimate textual offspring, specifically, the two scandal chronicles named in the Scriblerian footnote in which ‘Eliza’ is identified as ‘authoress of those most scandalous books called the court of Carimania and the New Utopia’.49 David Oakleaf has observed that ‘the prolific author’ who wrote these books is ‘caricatured as an offensively teeming and lactating woman’, but something of the opposite effect is achieved by placing the babes at her waist rather than her breasts.50 Waist suggests rubbish, discard and worthlessness, but it may carry a more specific print-world application in the sense of spoiled, wasted, or surplus sheets. In any event the ‘plot’ of the episode associates Haywood with excrement – she is depicted as virtually interchangeable with the second-place prize, a chamber pot – and she is reduced to an acquiescent trophy in a pissing competition between two print-trade men, in the finish something of a simpering love babe herself. As Valerie Rumbold makes evident in a fascinating essay, Pope very effectively strips Haywood of her authorial agency.51 For all the monstrous sexualizing of his portrait, his motivations seem more professional than personal. In the Hillarian circle the reaction against the author of Memoirs of a Certain Island was pronounced.52 It seems to have been prompted by her attack on Sansom, reviled at length in Memoirs as Gloatitia. Gloatitia – in period usage the name implies lechery – is a ‘vile Woman’ who had incestuous relations with her father, brought three bastard children into her marriage, and now has sex with everyone her ‘now almost antiquated Charms have power to seduce’, and so on. Plus she is a bad poet. Haywood the professional writer despised the leisured and irritatingly glamorous Sansom and had been taking swipes at her in her fictions for years – in the person of the boundlessly lustful baroness de Tortillée in The Injur’d Husband, for example – but in Memoirs, as Gerrard observed, that assault was ‘so flagrant’ – and so nastily personal – ‘that it backfired on her altogether’, provoking ‘a backlash of criticism’ that ‘effectively ended her association with the circle’.53 In 1723, after somehow getting hold of the ‘Gloatitia’ account in manuscript, Sansom tried to enlist Hill’s assistance in getting the account

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suppressed. In a letter dated October 1723 (published much later as Clio) she exclaimed against that ‘Scorpion Haywood’ and begged Hill to protect her from this ‘Tygress’, this ‘Devil’, this ‘female Fiend’.54 Whether Hill took any action at the time is unknown but a year later he clearly saw what was coming. On 4 September, just days before the well-advertised release of Memoirs, he devoted the leader of his periodical The Plain Dealer to a pained account of detractors, characterized as ‘most ravenous Beasts of Prey’. The next month, 26 October 1724, in a follow-up piece on detraction, he clearly has Haywood in mind in his closing reference to stories ‘written by the Unfair Author of the NEW UTOPIA’. A comment from a letter written by David Mallet the following year suggests that the image of Haywood-the-fiend must have circulated through the Hillarian circle: ‘I must tell you’, he writes to Savage, ‘that if I judge by that Fury’s writings, one that thoroughly knows her is acquainted with all the vicious part of the sex’.55 Leah Orr has recently cast doubt on Haywood’s authorship of Memoirs of a Certain Island, arguing that in this (and a number of other cases) ‘attribution is based on unsatisfactory evidence’, but the highly personal nature of much of the writing in Memoirs, which specialists feel contains a good deal of reliable inside information about Hill, Sansom, Savage and others, combined with the documented responses of Sansom, Hill, and Mallet make it clear that she was recognized by the circle to be its author and the attribution should be accepted.56 The disintegration of Haywood’s connection with the Hillarian circle plays a decisive role in her transition from coterie to marketplace writing in one recent account. In Rebecca Bullard’s analysis, Haywood came out of the Memoirs debacle a ‘lone literary businesswoman playing the market for fiction’.57 The emphasis on her isolation may be misleading, as shall be argued in subsequent chapters, but Bullard is right to call attention to the way the backlash from its publication deprived Haywood of the encouragement and support she had received from Hill and perhaps others. But it is easy to go too far with this argument. The financial support Hill was able to offer had been limited from the start. The Hillarians comprised what today might be called a social network of like-minded peers. Its members exchanged verses to and about each other, discussed ideas, encouraged one another in their work, flirted and so on, but the man at its centre was never a substitute for a wealthy patron. As his biographer notes, ‘Hill was not a “patron” along the lines of a Burlington, Dodington, or Bathurst, simply because he could not afford to be’. His support of the young writers and artists drawn into his orbit ‘consisted of using every available means to draw deserving writers to the public attention’.58 In 1721 he subscribed to her second publication, for example, and that same year furnished an epilogue for her play, The Fair Captive. But for more material forms of support, Haywood was obliged to look elsewhere. The printed version of Fair Captive is dedicated to Viscount Gage, and she gratefully acknowledges his support: ‘your Lordship’s pity found me; and by an excess of goodness taught me that those very Misfortune’s’ – ‘the tide of raillery’ she met

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

as a woman writer – ‘were Pleas sufficient to introduce me here’.59 A dedicatee’s excess of goodness conventionally expressed itself in ten guineas. The rupture with the Hillarians probably had no real effect on her financial situation but probably did accelerate her conception of herself as an author by profession. Even during the early days when she was buoyed by what may have begun as a devil-may-care friendship with the erratic Savage, Haywood seems to have hankered after fame. She plainly did not regard herself as a hireling but neither did she think of herself as a genteel amateur idling away her leisure hours for the amusement of herself and her drawing-room friends. She craved public recognition. That she was aiming high, or at least higher than many have imagined, is suggested by the impressive production values of her first three publications. Love in Excess, printed on quality paper in prestigious Elzivar type with generous margins, was followed by a handsome subscription publication, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1720), to which she appended a ‘Discourse’ offering a thoughtful examination of issues of women and writing. The aspirations implicit in these gestures surface with startling clarity in the ‘Advertisement to the Reader’ in the printed version of her harem play The Fair Captive (1721). It begins on what might appear at first to be a note of ‘aristocratic disdain’, to use Spedding’s phrase: ‘To attempt any thing in Vindication of the following Scenes, wou’d cost me more Time than the Composing ’em took me up’.60 She had been commissioned by the theatre manager John Rich to ‘mend’ a play by one Captain Hurst, and had she known she would come away from the project billed as the ‘sole Author’ she ‘should certainly have taken more pains’. The high standards that she set for herself at this time required that she distance herself from the herd of hacks whose ‘meaner’ – that is mercenary and therefore debasing – views she declines to share: ‘But without a Prospect of some Applause, I shou’d never imagine, if the Example of many Authors did not convince me, that any meaner Views cou’d wing the Poet’s Flight’.61 She aims for applause; for literary fame. We can get some idea of the ardency of her desire for fame from the coterie verse she exchanged with Hill, a figure of inestimable importance in her early creative and professional life.62 Internal evidence from the surviving verse suggests they knew each other by 1718 or 1719, and on the evidence of these poems he became very quickly a mentor, inspiration, male muse and sun-like father figure.63 The verse they exchanged is written in the exalted sublime mode and shows that Haywood imbibed the same heady Longinian brew as that quaffed by her mentor and his object of admiration, John Dennis. Hill is her sun, he fills her with the ardour to emulate his high standards of poetic production: to admire him is ‘the best Plea for Fame’.64 Scholars who have looked at these poems have concluded that Haywood fiercely admired Hill, which seems incontestable, and that she was passionately in love with him as well, which is less certain. Christine Gerrard is probably right to say ‘it would not be too extreme to say that

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Haywood adored Hill as a man’, but it needs to be added that the Haywood we encounter in these verses is less the adoring acolyte than an ambitious literary disciple all but bursting with confidence in her creative powers, a fledgling poet who in the best sense of the phrase is full of herself.65 She boasts of giving Hill his coterie name of Hillarius – ‘I Own the Name, which to my Muse owes Birth’ – and exults in her self-conferred poetic powers: ‘Far as Creation reaches, shall the Name / Eliza chose, tune the whole Voice of Fame’.66 The writer who stands revealed in these remarkable poems is one who saw herself first and foremost as a poet in the classical tradition of the sublime who hungers for fame and is spurred by the spirit of emulation and by what a character in one of her late novels would call an ‘ardor for doing something that might give me a name’.67 It would be hard to exaggerate Hill’s importance in Haywood’s earliest selfconception as a writer and her regret for the loss of his friendship. In some of the works written in the years immediately following the publication of Memoirs, we can watch her attempting in various ways to reassert her connection with Hill and his circle while at the same time lashing out in print against Savage, whom she clearly felt the need to punish. The clearest example of this is furnished by the two ironically ‘polite’ mock-coterie Tea Table pamphlets from 1724 and 1725 that seem almost poignant in the clumsiness of their attempts to recreate Haywood’s role within a still unbroken Hill circle of the mind. The sweet-tempered Philetus, master of many accomplishments and ‘Plain-dealer without Bluntness’, is the Hill surrogate (Hill was editing Plain Dealer at the time), and the admirable and high-minded Amiana is Haywood herself.68 The group engages in the sort of polite conversation, discussions of recent literary publications for example, that one imagines replicates in some fashion the coterie gatherings in which Haywood had herself once participated. One of the most interesting moments comes in the second Tea Table when Amiana is allowed the final word on the unnamed ‘Author of a late Pamphlet entitled, The Authors of the Town’, Savage that is to say.69 His harsh satire on contemporary writers had been published anonymously in September 1725, but Haywood had no trouble recognizing his hand. It contains the famous reference to Haywood as a ‘cast-off Dame’ and is the first known public attack on her. In a series of invidious comparisons Savage contrasts the ‘sulph’rous’ Haywood with the ‘seraphic’ Clio, that is, Martha Sansom, and in what appears to be a calculated attempt to inflict maximum pain, compares her unfavourably to Clio as a writer. Clio moves the passions of her readers and is the very ‘Soul of Song!’ while Haywood is a failure twice over – a failure with men, a failure as an actress – able to claim success only as a ‘Printer’s Drudge’: A cast-off Dame, who of Intrigues can judge, Writes Scandal in Romance—A Printer’s Drudge! Flush’d with Success, for Stage-Renown she pants, And melts, and swells, and pens luxurious Rants.70

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

It must have given Haywood satisfaction to have Amiana, a person whose ‘inimitable good Nature makes her an Enemy to all kind of Detraction’, loftily dismiss Savage as a subject ‘little worthy our Regard’.71 In the instalment of Tea Table from the previous year Haywood had meted out almost comically elaborate fictive punishments on Savage and Sansom in the story of ‘Beraldus and Celemena’.72 This retributive fantasy features, in addition to the usual Haywood love triangle, a formidable princess-protector who takes it upon herself to avenge Beraldus’s betrayal of the sweetly innocent Celemena. She forces Beraldus, a thinly veiled Savage (feckless and charming, cruel and malicious), to marry a worthless slut named Lamira (Sansom’s coterie name at this time was Mira) whom he will eventually poison and for which he will suffer ‘a shameful Death’. Haywood spun out other revenge fantasies in the second half of the 1720s, the best known being The Mercenary Lover (1726) and The City Jilt (1726), and they afford matter aplenty for anyone who wishes to explore the psychosexual complexities of Haywood’s personality or to poke around further in the muck of her strange but ultimately, I suspect, impenetrable intimacies with Savage. For our purposes here, the Tea Table pamphlets mark a kind of last ditch effort to represent in idealized form the personalities and perhaps dynamics of the Hillarian circle, but Haywood seems to have realized that it was no longer possible to sustain even in fictions a real or imagined coterie identity. The days of sublime odes were over and with them the increasingly unrealistic hope of winning the sort of high literary fame that had animated her in the old glory days of verse exchange with Hill. Desire for literary renown is not conspicuous in the years following Memoirs. She would now begin to publish anonymously – nearly all of her previous work had come out under her own name – and would behave to all appearances like an author by profession. Well into the thirties she would continue to seek support from wealthy patrons, but the sheer volume of her production indicates that she recognized her financial fortunes would rise or fall according to the demands of the marketplace. A naturally fluent writer, she may have intuited through some inborn business sense that she would need to rely upon what today we would call branding and product placement to survive in the burgeoning literary marketplace. Almost from the start she was savvy about the creation of product lines and brand identities and obviously gave thought to the question of how to market her titles. By the end of the decade she had developed the marketing principles she would follow for the rest of her long and well-organized career. Her pattern was to publish under a number of carefully crafted authorial identities. ‘Mrs Haywood’ was reserved for the racy but ‘polite’ amatory fictions in the Love in Excess product line. Her other works, with some exceptions, would be brought out anonymously or, as was often the case, identified by what might be called lateral attributions – that is, various ‘by the author of ’ identities – the author of Female Spectator, the author of Betsy

‘Her Approach to Fame’

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Thoughtless and so on. A lateral attribution heavily used in the second half of the 1720s was the ‘Celebrated Author’ of chronicles of a ‘Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia’. Two works in particular feature in the ‘Island’ franchise. They are The Mercenary Lover (1726), a true secret history of a ‘city amour’ in a ‘certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia’ by the author of the memoirs ‘of the said Island’; and, second, Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (1726), said to be by ‘the Author of The Mercenary Lover, and the Memoirs of the said Island’. In addition, in 1725 and 1726 she brought out under the Roberts imprint a number of anonymous fictions that professed to be secret histories – The City Jilt, The Double Marriage, for instance – and Spedding ascribes to her two further scandal memoirs in 1726, The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania and Letters from the Palace of Fame, also under the Roberts imprint. In other words, for a two-year period starting in autumn 1724 she trafficked – deliberately, intensively, and anonymously – in the production of ‘secret histories’ and scandal. In late August 1724, just a month before Memoirs of a Certain Island was issued, she launched the high-toned, upmarket translation entitled La Belle Assemblée. She cannily distinguished this ultra-polite offering from both the risqué amatory fictions that preceded and the scandal chronicles that would soon follow by identifying it only by the name of its French author, Madame de Gomez. It was a smart move. La Belle Assemblée turned out to be one of her most commercially successful titles, second in popularity only to The Female Spectator, by one of Spedding’s calculations.73 She used the Gomez name again with its 1734 successor, L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits. In 1732, when she played Lady Flame at the Haymarket, she let it be known that this outrageous role was being played by Madame de Gomez! Haywood was indeed ‘deliberate in her exploitation of media culture’, as Margaret Croskery has observed, and the 1720s saw her juggling at least three main product lines.74 It is clear that she took pains to protect both the amatory sublime fictions and the high-toned Gomez translations from the contaminations ensuing from the release of the roman à clef ‘Island’ scandal narratives. For the rest of her career, her titles would be marketed in clustered product lines manipulated by Haywood in concert with her booksellers. The notion that anonymity provided a self-protective refuge from the battering delivered by The Dunciad is now rightly discredited – Haywood was tougher than that and besides the post-Dunciad years saw a highly visible return to the London stage – but the shift of direction in her publishing behaviour towards anonymity and strategic branding is real and makes good business sense from the perspective of the demands of marketplace professionalism. Late in 1724 in the mildly paranoid dedication to Memoirs of the Baron de Brosse, Haywood complains about the ‘numerous Difficulties a Woman has to struggle through in her Approach to Fame’. A successful woman meets with envy;

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a failed woman, contempt. The ‘cold Breath of Scorn chills the little Genius’ that ‘cherished by Encouragement, might, in Time, grow to a Praise-worthy Height’. Besides, the author is ‘not without Enemies, who, perhaps, may have represented me in a Light vastly different from what I am’.75 This dedication goes well beyond conventional complaint and offers yet another indicator of how deeply Haywood was shaken by the rupture with the Hillarians. But she never ceased craving fame. In the early 1740s when she opened her pamphlet shop in the Great Piazza she hung out a sign featuring an iconic female figure – Fame – blowing a trumpet announcing the triumph of Patriot virtue. Fame had taken on a range of new meanings, many of them oppositional, and Haywood was on the verge of entering into the political phase of her career. The fall from grace with the Hillarians compelled her to confront the writer she had become perhaps without entirely realizing it: a thoroughgoing professional. This goes beyond the basic fact of subsistence writing to encompass a whole new conception of herself as writing to meet the demands of the marketplace: more muck-raking ‘Island’ satires, revenge tales for angry girls, self-help manuals for aspiring servants, advice to husbands and wives, translations of semi-pornographic material from the continent and, of course, political satire and journalism.

2 MEMOIRS OF A CERTAIN ISLAND ADJACENT TO UTOPIA

Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724–5) is more often invoked than actually studied, and understandably so. This two-volume work, Haywood’s first and most important scandal chronicle, is a fiercely topical roman à clef of 568 pages teeming with contemporary gossip and scandal, much of it scathingly delivered, and critics must proceed through this swarm of contemporary references without benefit of notes or historical commentary. A modern scholarly edition is sorely needed. Until the actual persons and events in this key fiction are identified, accounts of the politics of Memoirs must remain provisional. Part 1, published and heavily advertised in September 1724, deals with corruptions in the period leading up to the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 and is known to contain long stretches of fairly spectacular personal score-settling including the vicious smear against Martha Sansom discussed in the previous chapter that led one critic to remark that it is ‘hard to imagine any depths to which Haywood will not sink in her prose scandal chronicles’.1 Haywood must have soon begun the second volume. Part 2 came out the next year and stands as a kind of follow-up report on the state of the nation in the new age of greed. It retails an assortment of scandals both contemporary and not-so, but some so precisely to-the-moment that they can be said to pioneer the ‘ripped from the headlines’ techniques familiar on modern television crime dramas. The stories in this largely unexplored second volume – not reprinted since 1726 – are unusually lurid, brutal, retributive, and coarse and they include a cluster of graphic rape scenes that still have the power to shock.2 Some of the most powerfully imagined scenes express outrage over the Chancery scandal that rocked the nation and dominated the press in 1725 when Haywood was writing Part 2. (The Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Macclesfield, was impeached and found guilty of embezzlement on a massive scale.) The two parts of Memoirs detail the moral failures that gave rise to the nation’s first great financial crisis and the Chancery crisis that soon followed, and together they mount a ferocious attack on the greed, corruption, collective delusion and social injustice that flourished in the new credit-driven and money-obsessed economic order. Haywood had joined – 35 –

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the critics of the new finance and was writing now as a satirist in the Machiavellian or ‘Country’ tradition.3 Despite the recent surge of interest in Haywood’s politics in the twenties and the sense that Memoirs of a Certain Island represents a key text for this period, the crucial project of excavating its real-life scandals has only just begun. Much archival sifting will be required to work out the rich network of links between the allegorical situations and the actual institutions targeted, including the South Sea Company, Bank of England, Chancery and Parliament. This exploratory chapter lays the foundations for study of the contemporary basis of the scandals chronicled in Memoirs of a Certain Island. It begins by clearing away misunderstandings that have piled up over the years starting with the notion that the work is chiefly a ‘Tory’ attack on Walpole. The reigning orthodoxy that a diffusive Tory ideology defines Haywood’s political thinking has made it easy to assume the evil magician Lucitario, chief villain of Part 1, is a Walpole surrogate and the satire denounces ‘Walpole’s administration as corrupt and, literally demoralizing’.4 Lucitario bears a strong family resemblance to the many necromantic Walpolesque figures populating Augustan satire, the wicked wizard Ochihatou in Haywood’s own Eovaai (1736) being an oft-cited example,5 but to identify him as Walpole is to take much for granted and to ignore historical fact. Walpole was no friend of the Tory-conceived South Sea Company and is not thought to have played much if any part in the dubious arrangements that resulted in the South Sea disaster. Lucitario corresponds far more closely to James Craggs senior, the Postmaster-General whom an authoritative modern account describes as ‘the last, and one of the least popular, victims of parliamentary vengeance’.6 The most grossly misleading notion to be confronted is the strange one – strange in light of the work’s acknowledged generic status as a roman à clef – that the narrative lacks satiric particularity and specific political targets. Only by ignoring its richly topical dimension is criticism able to sustain John Richetti’s early assessment that Memoirs of a Certain Island is a ‘gratuitously sensational’ work with no ‘political point of view’ which traffics in ‘sexual scandal for its own sake’.7 It requires only a little digging in contemporary newspapers and pamphlets to discover that the sexual scandals rehearsed with such outrage by the narrator are rooted in and serve to lay bare real-life social and economic injustices particular to this moment of financial crisis. But it is equally a mistake to regard Haywood as leading the charge against Walpole. It is almost startling to discover, in fact, that if anything she seems to take the ministerial line by underscoring the guilt of the government’s scapegoats, many of whom were conveniently dead or already punished. The anti-Walpole reading also fails to taken into account the fact that she mounts a sustained attack on one of Walpole’s most outspoken critics, the radical Old Whig John Trenchard (1662–1723), who called loudly for government accountability and

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accused the ministry of failing to punish the guilty. As much as her admirers might wish it were not so, it is hard to gainsay that Haywood took the ministerial side in the matter of the South Sea cover-up and not easy to dispel the suspicion that she may have been using the scandal chronicle to seek government support. Rebecca Bullard has commented that if she ‘was making a bid for ministerial patronage’ in Memoirs of a Certain Island, then ‘a significant reappraisal of the politics of the early part of Haywood’s career would be required’.8 She is right, and this chapter represents a step towards that reappraisal. But the most significant feature of the narrative, and it has gone almost unexplored, is its demand for justice for men and women in the middling and lower social ranks. It is a commonplace that in the amatory fictions of the 1720s Haywood expresses sympathy for female frailty, especially young girls undone by predatory men and their own undisciplined desires. Memoirs of a Certain Island goes a step further. It calls attention to the sufferings of victims of both sexes and many social ranks in the context of an unprecedented (and hitherto unimaginable) financial crisis rooted in the new interpenetration of business, finance and government. The result is a hybrid satire on the state of the nation that uses amatory codes and conventions of the earlier seduction fictions to indict the failure of British institutions to redress the grievances of the most vulnerable members of society. Part 1 exposes the effects of the pursuit of speculative wealth; by the end of Part 2, the seemingly countless scandals that have been woven together serve to expose corruptions so ingrained in the nation’s institutions that they can only be regarded as systemic. The work as a whole is filled with outrage at the injustice that runs rampant in the new financial and socio-economic order where self-interest and the desire for wealth trump all else.9 Memoirs of a Certain Island is less concerned with party divisions than with national corruption and a widespread failure of fellow-feeling. In addition, it marks a new direction in prose fiction, a movement toward contact with everyday reality that is linked to what I shall call Haywood’s ‘tabloidizing’ imagination.

Patron-stalking in Memoirs The glowing portrait at the end of the first volume of Walpole as ‘Cleomenes’ has disconcerted some critics. Cleomenes, whom the ‘truly Meritorious ne’er sued’ ‘in vain’, is identified in the London key as ‘Mr. W—e’. He is hailed as a ‘greatly noble Patriot, whose only Care, whose only Aim, is how to serve his Country, shows he despises all those sordid Views by which his Contemporaries are sway’d, looks down on Titles, and chuses to be great in Worth alone’.10 Students of Haywood claim to detect irony in the praise, and they may be right; but they may be indulging in wishful thinking.11 Praise of Walpole as a patriot who ‘looks down on titles, and chuses to be great in worth alone’ sounds considerably more

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

ironic today than it would have in 1724. In June of the preceding year, to much public astonishment, Walpole refused a peerage.12 Writers and artists at this time were compelled to find support with a patron class with often shifting political interests and it was not always easy ‘for an artist to know which horse to back’.13 In 1724 the horse of choice often looked to be Walpole. He was not yet the fearsome ‘Great Man’ he would become in the late 1720s and 1730s when he did indeed achieve mythological status as a ‘monster’, and a recognizable campaign of opposition to Walpole cannot be said to have emerged much before the final months of 1726 when Bolingbroke and Pulteney launched The Craftsman. When Haywood was lauding his shining merits in Memoirs of a Certain Island, Walpole was a sought-after patron and, his reputation as the ‘poet’s foe’ notwithstanding, a generous supporter of writers.14 In 1726 James Thomson called him, without irony, the ‘most illustrious patriot’ and a few years later Henry Fielding would extol him as the ‘bulwark of liberty against Jacobitism and Popery’.15 Fielding’s dedication to Walpole in The Modern Husband (1732) has been described elsewhere as ‘ringing panegyric’.16 Walpole in the 1720s was courted by writers who would go on to become leading names in the Opposition, and if Haywood was not averse to cultivating his favour in Memoirs, she was doing no more than Thomson, Swift, Pope and later Fielding and others would do.17 Memoirs extends flattering treatment to the Dukes of Chandos, Devonshire, Dorset, and Argyle, all wealthy Whig magnates known to be liberal in their support of writers.18 Her attentiveness to the basic requirements of patronageseeking is neatly illustrated in the way she coordinated her compliments with changes of personnel in the royal household. When Part 1 was written the Duke of Argyle was lord steward of the royal household and accordingly the recipient (as ‘Argeno’) of two paragraphs of flattery.19 He was succeeded over the summer by Dorset and thus in the next volume it is Dorset (as ‘Dorinthus’) who possesses precisely those virtues that shine most brightly in a patron: ‘Wisdom and Liberality’.20 A leading Whig patron who comes in for more elaborate flattery in Part 2 is George Bubb Dodington. Wealthy, liberal and keen to cultivate an image as a supporter of the literary arts, Dodington was appointed one of the Lords of the Treasury in 1724. The position presumably enhanced his attractions as a patron. Edward Young dedicated the third satire of his Universal Passion to him in 1725. He had earlier evidently agreed to lend his support to Haywood’s second publication, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1722), for he appears among the 309 listed subscribers. In Memoirs of a Certain Island Dorileas, identified in the key as ‘G. D-d-n, Esq’, is the subject of an adulatory passage four pages long that includes a tribute to a ‘Generosity, scarce to be equall’d’ as well as the ‘Alacrity, the Courtesy, the Affability with which he confers a Favour’.21 Less predictably, he is further distinguished by being turned into an erotically compelling romance hero (‘the Darling of the Fair!’) opposite Mrs.

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Strawbridge (‘Melinda’). The famously pug-nosed, full-bellied, buffoonish, and easily caricatured ‘Bubb’ – Pope’s ‘Bufo’ – is endowed in the Memoirs account with wit and, improbably, ‘Beauty’. The attention to detail and character analysis goes far enough beyond the requirements of patron-stalking to suggest personal acquaintance that is corroborated by later developments.22 The likelihood that Haywood and Dodington were known to each other will become especially important when we take up her involvement in the Leicester House opposition. The Whig orientation of her dedications and commendatory passages in the 1720s is too pronounced to be ignored. We need not imagine her throwing in her lot with the Whig government to recognize that as a matter of prudence Haywood would seek to minimize the risk of offending power and, without in any way impugning her integrity, observe that at a time when wealthy Whigs dominated that patronal class, an author by profession could hardly be blamed for greasing the machinery of support.

The Politics of the South Sea Bubble Haywood’s richly imagined response to the South Sea crisis in Part 1 of Memoirs of a Certain Island has been almost completely overlooked by economic and political historians, although a handful of literary scholars have called attention to the force of her symbolism and insight of her cultural analysis. Christine Gerrard, for example, notes ‘the brilliant analogy between the South Sea Bubble fraud and ministerial alchemy’ and usefully summarizes the typology linking ‘powerful ministers with wizardry and evil spells’ that goes back into the seventeenth century and flourished during the period of Queen Anne.23 Haywood uses metaphors of necromancy to characterize the irrational basis of the lust for acquisition created by the seeming ‘magic’ of credit, speculation, paper wealth and other mechanisms of the financial revolution, mechanisms both feared and reviled as chicanery by Haywood and other critics of the new economic order who often represent credit and speculation as dangerous alchemy. At the symbolic centre of Haywood’s satire is the Enchanted Well, the South Sea Company, which holds the deluded people of ‘yonder proud Metropolis’ in the grip of a ‘universal Infatuation’.24 Stupefied Londoners staring at the Well see a bubbling up of gold where there is really only ‘common Water’. Scarcely a person in ‘all this numerous Throng’ ‘appeared to be in his right Senses’. The wizard, Lucitario, practitioner of a ‘pernicious Art’, ‘wrought so far on the Minds of the deluded Multitude, as to make it almost universally believed, that whoever would be rich, must repair to this miraculous Spring’.25 Images of wizardry and enchantment deliver a powerful vision of a society undone at every level, rich and poor, old and young, by failure to resist the seductive promise of easy wealth.

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

The evil enchanter in all of this, Lucitario, ‘C-----gs’ in the London key, is almost certainly James Craggs senior, the Postmaster General, known to be heavily involved in the scandal along with his son, James Craggs junior.26 The important circumstance that both were friends of Pope is something to which we will return. Craggs senior worked closely with Sir John Blunt, principle director of the South Sea Company, in what turned out to be a corrupt partnership between the government and City finance.27 The allegory of the origins of the South Sea disaster constructed by Haywood stresses the way the ‘magic’ of credit and speculation interacted with the greed unleashed by new financial opportunities to create the conditions resulting in the Bubble. Lucitario/Craggs gains the king’s permission to bring a spring (the South Sea Company) under the control of his own priests (that is, stockjobbers) who delude credulous investors into thinking the ‘miraculous’ well would bring riches: common water ‘he made appear to the Eye like liquid Gold, flowing in Tides of Wealth to the Receiver’s hand’.28 A powerful image of greed, folly, and fantasy across social and economic lines is conveyed by this allegorized description of men and women of various walks investing in stock issued by the South Sea Company: Some came loaded with Plate,--others with Jewels, rich Furniture, Pictures, Beds, every one brought according to his Ability; for their Master Lucitario had ordered, that nothing should be refused.----’Tis incredible to what straits three Parts in four of these deluded Islanders reduced themselves, to glut the Avarice of a few, whose Adherence with the Necromancer raised them to a Condition far above what they could have hoped.--It was they indeed who batten’d in the Spoils of the others,--the floating Gold poured into their Coffers, while Water only was the Portion of the rest.29

Those who invest in expectation of high returns suffer ‘fatal Disappointment’, a phrase that might be mistaken for the title of an amatory novella.30 However, in the chronicling of seduction-with-a-difference in Memoirs of a Certain Island the role of the predatory seducer is given to the magician whose ‘pernicious Art’ ensnares not an artless virgin but rather, as befits the expanded scale of Haywood’s social vision, the ‘deluded Multitude’. And Walpole? Where does he fit in this? First, it needs to be said that his reputation for corruption at this time has been exaggerated. It is true that he came out of the South Sea scandal with consolidated power and a new identity as ‘the Screen-master’ in recognition of his skill in protecting implicated members of the government from scrutiny and punishment, and historians agree that he exercised ‘masterly duplicity over the whole affair’.31 But he had yet to acquire the aura of archetypal iniquity that is ascribed to him in much literary criticism. Walpole had been suspicious of the South Sea venture, though he did invest (and lose) money in it, and was not personally involved in the fraud and corruption that seeped through parliament and threatened even those closest to the throne.

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Nonetheless his political instincts told him every effort should be made to save the government. A popular history of the Bubble observes that the ‘conflict between the government and its opponents was one of the most spectacular of the century’ with many members of the government making it onto ‘the casualty list’. But much was show: ‘it was a process skilfully stage-managed by Walpole so that the severity of some of the punishments handed down screened the guilt of those in higher places that he had resolved privately to protect’.32 James Craggs senior was one of those chosen to take the fall. His death on 16 March 1721, possibly by suicide, made him all the more convenient a scapegoat. There was no organized opposition to Walpole to speak of when Memoirs of a Certain Island was written, but this does not mean that Walpole lacked critics. Had Haywood wished to go after him in print she had the example of a pair of fearless radical Whig authors, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon who, writing under the pseudonym ‘Cato’, published from November 1720 to September 1722 a series of scathingly anti-ministerial letters in the London Journal that amounted to a ‘formidable barrage of press propaganda’ against ‘the government itself ’.33 (The government expressed its displeasure by taking over the London Journal, but Cato’s letters then moved to the British Journal.) According to their modern editor, Cato called for ‘harsh and rapid punishment for all those responsible for mulcting the public, officers of the South Sea Company and members of the government alike’.34 It is another blow to the anti-Walpole hypothesis to find Haywood devoted twenty pages of Memoirs of a Certain Island to vilification of ‘Romanus’, the name an obvious substitute for Cato, Roman defender of liberty and radical Old Whig hero, as well as signatory of the famous letters.35 That ‘Romanus’ is identified in the key as ‘Mr. Tr----rd’ leaves little doubt of his identity. However it is not clear why Trenchard was selected to be the target of so much sustained abuse. Haywood certainly shared his indignation over the plundered victims of the South Sea Bubble, and one might have thought him precisely the sort of enemy of ministerial corruption with whom she would make common cause. Cato’s reflections upon the world’s incurable credulity and the beguiling effects of self-love might have been written by Haywood herself, and the scandals chronicled in Memoirs of a Certain Island repeatedly illustrate Cato’s oft-reiterated point about the destructive effects of passion, as in the observations in Letter No. 6 of 10 December 1720 that the passions of ‘hope, avarice, and ambition’ have had ‘such a headlong force upon the people, that they are become wretched and poor, by a ravenous appetite to grow great and rich’.36 Haywood allows Trenchard to be a man of ‘very great Genius’ – possessed of intelligence, subtle wit, and superb if morally suspect political abilities, but tainted by atheism (a charge often made by his enemies) – but invents a history of iniquitous treacheries vis-à-vis a series of women, including, intriguingly, false dealings with a ‘Graciana’ who is identified in the key as ‘Miss Ch—ld’.37

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The name is tantalizing, for it suggests a possible association with the banker Stephen Child, one of the South Sea Directors, although there is little enough in the story to suggest a South Sea connection beyond the fact that she lost her inheritance in the disaster. None of this goes far in explaining, however, the force of Haywood’s hostility to Trenchard. He had died the previous December and by autumn 1724 much of the fury over the South Sea fraud had calmed. Perhaps private reasons entered into it. But whatever her motives, the pronounced absence of sympathy for Romanus strengthens the impression of her reluctance to displease the ministry. Until further research into Haywood’s satiric targets has been conducted, we can only guess that her portrayal of Trenchard as a ‘most consummate Villain’ given to ‘monstrous Lyes’ and ‘ruinous Inventions’ may have played some part in a bid for ministerial good will.38 The South Sea context invites reconsideration of the character of ‘Marthalia’ who figures in the allegorical retelling of the history of the South Sea Company early in Part 1. The key identifies ‘Marthalia’ as ‘Mrs. Bl—t’, and on this basis Pope scholars have concluded that Haywood, for reasons no one pretends to fathom, undertook to smear Pope’s beloved friend Martha Blount as a shameless sink of lewdness and disease, never mind that the image produced by this motiveless malignity resembles no known account of Pope’s famously virtuous friend. Fairly typical of the critical reasoning is this from Pat Rogers’s respected Alexander Pope Encyclopedia: ‘AP’s horror at seeing his friend Martha Blount shown in this degrading way would have been sufficient to earn her a place in The Dunciad’.39 Few critics have bothered to query the identification and some have even responded with the equivalent of a dismissive shrug – that hack Haywood, inept even in her smears. But to read this character sketch in relation to established equivalences between sexual and financial corruption is to realize that, by the moral logic of Haywood’s satiric fiction, Marthalia’s sexual depravities serve as analogies for the financial corruptions of the South Sea Company. These analogies are reinforced by the storyline which has Marthalia marry an old, incurably diseased servant of Lucitario and become in this way ‘a Woman of consequence to those unhappy Wretches, who yet have any dependance on this cursed Well’.40 The name supplied in the key, ‘Bl----t’, may point toward Sir John Blunt, one of the company directors and co-architect with Craggs of some of the more fraudulent features of the South Sea scheme. He has been called ‘the man who more than any other individual in Britain was responsible for the South Sea Scheme and the public calamity which followed’.41 (A popular history describes Blunt as a ‘short, plump, unscrupulous little man who loved the feel and manipulation of money. His whole being was dedicated to its acquisition’).42 It is possible, in other words, that ‘Marthalia’ was never intended for nor was she read by contemporaries as Pope’s Patty Blount, a single woman of conspicuous virtue with no known connection to the South Sea scandal. Even the name may be a red herring since it

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may contain a reference to the despised Martha Sansom (formerly Fowke) abused so mercilessly elsewhere in Memoirs of a Certain Island as Gloatitia. Certainly the description of Marthalia as ‘the most dissolute and shameless of her Sex’ closely matches Haywood’s other representations of Sansom from this time.43 Scholarly fixation on Martha Blount as the original of the lewd Marthalia has deflected attention from a more likely source of Pope’s animosity, his indignation over her rough treatment of friends who were (in his view) sufferers by the South Sea calamity. Pope admired Sir John Blunt and was great friends with the Craggs, father and son. It seems more reasonable to connect his reproachful reference to Haywood as author of the ‘most scandalous’ book ‘the New Utopia’ with her scurrilous portrayal of Blunt and more especially Craggs as Lucitario. The habit of reading Haywood through The Dunciad has made it easy to overlook her affinities with Pope and the other great Augustan satirists. In The Dunciad, Pope ‘envisaged a society akin to that portrayed in Orwell’s 1984, in which a stupefied populace has willingly surrendered its rights and privileges, not to Big Brother, but to the Goddess Dulness’.44 Criticism today is more likely to associate Haywood with the figure of Dulness rather than with the satiric aims of her creator, and while Haywood did not declare war on the dunces exactly, she, like Pope, Swift, and others, developed themes of national stupefaction alongside related themes of moral corruption and national degeneration as part of the Machiavellian or ‘Country’ critique of the modern culture of greed. The satiric fiction of ‘a certain island’ sunk in dull stupidity that she sustains in Memoirs of a Certain Island predates The Dunciad by several years. Has any student of Pope noticed that Haywood laments the new rule of ‘Stupidity and uncorrected Dullness’? That the ‘tuneful Muses’ are said to ‘fly the uncultivated Waste—all Arts, all Sciences be lost’?45 Ballaster proposes that Haywood and Manley ‘might be regarded as shadowy forebears, the “mothers” of Pope’s own scandalous writing’ and it might be added that the display of folly, irrationality, credulity, gloom, decay, social madness and degeneration on a national scale offered up in Memoirs of a Certain Island looks forward not only to The Dunciad but also to Gulliver’s Travels.46 Her satire features scenes of urban confusion where all orders and degrees are found ‘promiscuously mingled’ and scarcely anyone ‘appeared to be in his right Senses’; offers multiple iterations of the collective stupidity of a social order lost to appetite, acquisition and delusion and of the insanity of a people undone by fantasies of wealth and power; and projects a dismayed sense of the reckless young squandering the inheritance of ‘their careful Ancestors’.47 Haywood’s satiric vision of England in the time of the Hanoverians has more in common with the work of Pope and Swift than either of her fellow satirists cared to admit.

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The Counterfeit Heiress The second volume of Memoirs of a Certain Island came out in late October 1725 in time for the new political season. Part 1 had offered a retrospective on the corruptions leading up to and revealed in the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and was thus already slightly out of date when it went on sale. (It has been suggested that Haywood began to write Part 1 earlier, when the events allegorized through its interwoven amatory stories were fresher).48 The clamouring for full exposure of government complicity had long been silenced. Trenchard was dead and his partner, George Gordon, the other half of ‘Cato’, had been bought off by the government – Walpole was discovering already the efficacy of bribes for muzzling oppositional voices – and the once anti-ministerial London Journal had become a government organ. On 24 April 1725 it announced with approbation one of Walpole’s beloved initiatives, the revival of the ‘ancient and noble’ Knights of the Bath. The revival of the Knights of Fame, as the order is renamed in Part 2 of Memoirs of a Certain Island, is announced by the ‘Trump of Fame’ and exalted for several excited pages by the goddess Fame herself: ‘A Troop of noble Youths, by me inspir’d, thirst to reform the Manners of the Age: With solemn Vows they bind themselves to right the Injured – defend the Widows and the Orphans Claims, – rescue assaulted Chastity, – and fight the Cause of all that are defenceless and forlorn’.49 This passage further weakens claims made for the anti-Walpole thrust of Memoirs but more importantly for our purposes here, it illustrates the largely unrecognized contemporaneity of the narrative that complicates the received understanding of Memoirs as a continuation of the strategies and procedures that Manley had exploited so successfully in her New Atalantis (1709). Haywood doubtless hoped Memoirs of a Certain Island would capitalize on the vogue for exposés of scandal in high places created by the sensational success of Atalantis in 1709, but her chronique scandaleuse is far from being the ‘slavish imitation’ of its predecessor it is sometimes said to be.50 Nor did it acquire the huge sales or notoriety of Atalantis.51 That said, there are many similarities. Both are loosely structured collections of frame tales tending toward revelations of sexual misconduct, and behind them both stands a long tradition of ‘secret histories’ that includes Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684–7) and extends back to Procopius in the sixth century. But the differences are equally important. Manley was a partisan writer par excellence, a dogged Tory operative who claimed, disingenuously, that the tales in Atalantis were recycled scandals without political import, ‘old Stories that all the World had long since reported’. But the ‘old Stories’ were plainly meant to sting and are often said to have discomforted the Godolphin (Whig) ministry in the run-up to the general election. Manley would later describe Atalantis as a ‘publick attempt made against those designs & that ministry which have been so happily changed’.52 She

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was well-connected with Tory movers-and-shakers – she assisted Swift in editing The Examiner – and was arrested in connection with Atalantis. Haywood, on the other hand, was a political outsider with no discernible backing from any side and did what she needed to do to ingratiate herself with the government. There is nothing to suggest that she met with harassment from the authorities. Whatever Tory or oppositional sympathies Haywood may have harboured, Memoirs is not a party political scandal chronicle in the Atalantis tradition and to frame it thus is, ironically, to lose sight of much of its political significance. The notion that Haywood did not deal in au courant political materials is a misunderstanding that can now be corrected. Reading in newspapers from 1725 reveals that many of the tales told in Part 2 are fictionalizations of scandal and gossip making the rounds in ‘the town’ during the months she was writing the sequel. This is not to say that she did not sometimes reheat old scandals in the Manley fashion. Part 2 includes a compressed but morally outraged retelling of the Castlehaven scandal that had been in print circulation for nearly a century, to take just one example.53 But more often her materials were remarkably contemporaneous. In this regard Memoirs of a Certain Island is part of the ‘novelistic’ turn of prose fiction towards contact with what literary critics would call the Bakhtinian zone of the present. Thanks to the work of Paul Hunter and others we know that the early novel was obsessed with its own contemporaneity and expresses that obsession in scenes featuring keyholes, spying, eavesdropping, tell-tale chinks in the wall and so on. Illicit curiosity is thematized everywhere in Memoirs of a Certain Island (as in Haywood’s fiction generally), which is filled with real-life, sensationalized to-the-moment reportage that gives the narrative something of the immediacy of such traditionally ephemeral forms as broadsides, street ballads and the more recent newspapers but also anticipates the guilty appeal of tabloid journalism today. A case in point is found toward the beginning of Part 2. In February 1725, ‘the town’ was talking about a quarrel between Lady Hervey, the former Molly Lepell, and her mother-in-law Lady Bristol, which included an exchange in which they gave ‘one another all the titles so liberally bestowed amongst the ladies at Billingsgate’, as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reported with characteristic relish.54 A lively and informed account of the exchange made its way into an early section of Part 2. Haywood skilfully depicts the dynamics of their relationship, depicting Lady Hervey (‘a blooming Beauty’) as much the cooler of the two, interrupting her mother-in-law’s agitated accusations with an ‘indolent and neglecting Air’: ‘Hold, Madam,’ she blandly cautions the older woman, wielding her self-control as a deadly weapon, ‘there is nothing in Nature so destructive to Beauty as excessive Passion.’55 In addition to a natural storyteller’s control over town gossip, we see here Haywood’s close contact with the public moment. Haywood departs most significantly from the conventions of the ‘secret history’ tradition as practised by Manley (and before her Behn) in partly shifting

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the focus from high life to the broad middling ranges of society. There is no dearth of courtiers and politicians with aristocratic corruptions in full peacock display in Memoirs of a Certain Island, but the field of representation has been broadened to include ordinary people whose stories for some reason have ‘made noise’ in the town – or, in some of the most interesting cases, have failed to make the noise that social justice would require. Part 2 offers an example of a mildly scandalous story that had already furnished the town with mirth and merriment for many months in 1725, that of the comeuppance of a real-life fortune-hunting man, one Mr Cockerell of Gloucester, who had been tricked into marrying a woman he believed to be a West Indies heiress. (The supposed heiress was a sharp-minded cook-maid in cahoots with a mother-daughter team, as it turns out.) The story can be followed in the London newspapers and eventually onto the pages of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers. To read the highly coloured version included in Memoirs alongside these widely circulated print sources is to see that Haywood took an amusing tale and turned it into a largely humourless, even bitter story of female revenge. The wedding, which took place on 10 May, received brief treatment on 17 May in the marriages section of Mist’s Weekly Journal: ‘Cockerell, Esq; of Gloucester, a Gentleman of 2000 l per Ann. to a pretended West-India Lady of 40,000 l. Fortune’. Later in the month an embroidered account of the ‘Frolick’ in the London Journal indicates that the public was avidly following a story with recognizable characters and a fortune-hunter-foiled plot device. Cockerell’s attempt to have the marriage annulled was unsuccessful: he ‘must submit to this just Deceit upon him’, the paper reported with satisfaction.56 But submit Cockerell did not. He brought a charge of fraud at the Old Bailey against mother and daughter, both named Hester Gregory. They were tried and acquitted on 27 August, and the depositions and verdict were printed in the Sessions Papers and were widely reported and often reprinted in the London papers in early September.57 Haywood expands these particulars into a fourteen-page revenge tale.58 In the Sessions Papers the story was a well-shaped comic tale turning on the perennially pleasing device of the biter bit that featured stock comedic characters (witty wenches, a greedy old fool) with names almost too good to be true (Mr. Cockerell, Thomas Fog), tangy colloquial speech, bursts of dialogue that seem almost to parody Haywood’s amatory manner (‘Her Heart! Her Soul! Her Fortune! All is yours!’), and a foolish senex who proclaims his own folly (‘Bit!’ exclaims the dupein-the-making, ‘No, no, I’m too old for that, they must have good Luck that can bite me.’). Neither retribution nor personal injury enters into the Sessions Papers account. The Gregory women who hatch the plot are not victims; the cook-maid they dress up and pass off as a Barbados heiress ends up handsomely married. In short, before Haywood got hold of the story it was a good-humoured tale of female ingenuity and male folly, a little jewel glinting unexpectedly in the Sessions

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Papers among the usual brief and sordid accounts that make up the reports of the Old Bailey trials; a fable of female wit triumphant over male folly and greed brimming with comedic potential and cheering feminist application. Such light-hearted fun was not for Haywood, however. She retains the happy ending of acquittal for the female defendants but gives the material leading up to it a darkly moralizing turn, transforming an amiable tale of female solidarity into a story of mutual deception and female revenge. In addition to inflating the supposed heiress’s wealth, she makes the plot to catch Cockerell (‘Corruvanus’) far more elaborate – involving fine lodgings, a new wardrobe, and ‘four Negro Servants in Bantomite Habits’.59 The elaborately mounted ruse recalls the stagecraft of ‘Incognita’ in Fantomina, also published at around this time, and the protagonist, a supremely artful servant and mistress of precisely calibrated deceptions, resembles both Fantomina and Syrena Tricksy of the later Anti-Pamela, characters through whom Haywood anatomizes the tricks of voice, manner, and language used by women to delude. The Memoirs story of the Counterfeit Heiress includes nearly three pages of closely observed analysis of the minutiae of feigned feeling – a striking example of her fascination with the whole panoply of tricks whereby men and women deceive and are deceived.60 But most remarkable is the transformation of the male and female principals. The trickster woman, Gregoria, an amalgam of the two Hester Gregorys, is now a woman wronged and righteously seeking revenge while Corruvanus, her fiancé, is a heartless cad rather than an aged buffoon. Discovering his (typically male) inconstancy, Gregoria determines to prosecute ‘triumphant Revenge on her perfidious and avaricious Lover’.61 In other words, Haywood indulges to the full the indignation she favoured in the immediate post-Hillarian years and the reader thus gains another opportunity to watch the workings of her punitive imaginative. She invents a succession of revenge scenarios and is pitiless, even ruthless in the punishments she invents for Cockerell/Corruvanus. In a relatively light-hearted scene in which a throng of tradesmen is made to appear at the bed of the newly married couple demanding payment, the response of the new husband is comically gratifying. Horror succeeds to terror and amazement and, in a punishment that Haywood often metes out to men of whom she disapproves, he loses the power of speech and can only look ‘wildly’ and speak with panic-stricken eyes. He contemplates imprisoning her in his country house there to ‘weary’ her to death, but is made to recall that ‘the Laws of this Island are very favourable to Wives’ and those with ‘Spirit enough to complain’ would ‘not fail of redress’.62 He is beset with shame and remorse and, worse, becomes the object of ridicule about town. Deliciously, Gregoria becomes the star of the trial achieving there in public the verbal command that Corruvanus had previously lost, able to give ‘handsome reasons’ for her actions ‘so effectually’ that her ‘speech met with a general Applause’.63 Corruvanus leaves the courtroom pursued by the hisses of the entire assembly. And

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still the punishment continues! He fails at a suicide attempt, is forced to pay an allowance to his wife, and lives on in great misery. One suspects that the revenge imagined here is mixed up somehow with feelings of unresolved anger connected with Savage, Sansom, and perhaps the Hillarians more generally, but the transformation of town tittle-tattle into retributive fantasy has a more strictly literary dimension that casts light on the workings of Haywood’s moral imagination. Gabrielle Starr observes of Behn that in her work ‘the status of an experience as fact (is it true that?) is pushed aside in favour of its imaginative conception, its potential for pleasure, or … its moral uses’.64 Haywood is no more interested than Behn in accuracy or veracity; the fable is all, and she excludes or invents details as needed to fill out the moral pattern. The retelling of the story of the Counterfeit Heiress is shaped by a symbolic moral logic that inflates a foolish senex into an example of the acquisitive appetite now gripping this ‘Wealth-adoring Town’.65 It also prefigures the preoccupation with women and the law that will feature importantly in Haywood’s fiction from this point onward. Readers familiar with City Jilt (1726), another tale of female wit triumphant over male perfidy, will be struck by the resemblances. The heroines in both use the mechanisms of the law to achieve their ends. Gregoria not only wins at court, she sparkles; her male antagonist is left satisfyingly speechless. But the story of the Counterfeit Heiress is unusual in Memoirs and indeed elsewhere in the oeuvre in the way it tilts justice in women’s direction. Haywood is far more likely to expose the failure of the law to redress female grievances, as will now be seen in her treatment of the Macclesfield affair.

A Universal Cry for Redress Of more consequence to the political life of the nation was the scandal in Chancery that rocked the kingdom in the first half of 1725 and culminated in the impeachment of the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Parker, the first Earl of Macclesfield. For many months, as Mist’s Weekly Journal reported in May, ‘a certain distress’d E--l’ stood at the centre of the town’s ‘Enquiry and Discourse’.66 Parker, created Earl of Macclesfield on 15 November 1721, stood at the apex of the national legal system: named Lord Chancellor on 12 May 1718, he was keeper of the great seal, chief secretary to the king, and chief justice in the Court of Chancery with a special remit to protect the weak and vulnerable – a circumstance of some irony, as will be seen. When rumours of corruption on a huge scale in Chancery began to surface in autumn 1724, Walpole created a committee of inquiry to look into the matter. They reported in mid-December that the Chancellor was implicated in the embezzlement of public funds: a staggering £60,000 had gone missing. Walpole, unwilling to be seen as once again ‘screening’ a corrupt colleague and having no great love for the Chancellor, who was allied with rival factions, was

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‘only too willing to assuage the rising tide of public indignation by discarding Macclesfield’.67 Macclesfield surrendered his seals of office on 4 January 1725 and the process of impeachment began. He was tried at the bar of the House of Lords and, on 25 May, was found guilty by the unanimous vote of ninety-three peers. He was fined £30,000 and sentenced to imprisonment in the Tower until the fine was paid. On 31 May his name was struck from the roll of privy councillors. The rapacity of Macclesfield’s greed coupled with his use of the powers of his office to steal from widows and orphans provoked outrage at every level of society. In an age that regarded pocket-lining on the part of its public officials with equanimity, the insatiability of Macclesfield’s appetite was something else again. At least as much as the vastness of the sums was the fact that they had been set aside for the use of helpless members of society under the express protection of the Chancellor: women, infants, and lunatics. ‘We look on no Injuries with stronger Impressions of Indignation, than those which are levell’d at Parties who have no Power,’ wrote the author of The Case of Orphans Consider’d in 1725.68 A broadside ballad also from 1725 asks in the voice of the famous criminal Jack Sheppard whether those ‘who plunder poor Orphans’ do not deserve a hanging ‘more than Blueskin and I?’69 A female pirate in Johnson’s General History of Pirates (1724) defends her trade on the grounds that its dangers keep it safe from those ‘who are now cheating the Widows and Orphans, and oppressing their poor Neighbours’.70 From the other end of the social spectrum Lord Morpeth charged that Macclesfield’s administration of Chancery was ‘one continued Pyratical-Trade’ in which the Chancellor ‘prey’d alike upon Masters and Suitors’. Much was made of his abuse of trust. He made ‘their helpless Condition a Means of their Ruin, instead of their Protection’. A Mr Snell described him as having an ‘insatiable Appetite after illegal Gains’ and reports that charges of corruption (in the sale of offices, extortion, and cover-ups) ‘had drawn upon him an universal Cry for Redress’. Another contemporary, a Mr Lutwyche, states that the corruptions at Chancery, long suspected, have at last become ‘a National Concern’ and all are now persuaded by the ‘Cries of Widows and Orphans’.71 The gross abuse of the vulnerable, the spectacle of boundless greed at the top, the morality-play polarity of good and evil, and of course the cry for redress of all those widows and orphans: no wonder Haywood devoted fifteen pages to the scandal that was unfolding as she was composing Part 2 of Memoirs.72 She seems to have responded on a deep level to the revelations of corruptions. She depicted the Chancellor as ‘worse than Cannibal’ in his feeding upon the helpless: he ‘devour’d their Substance and prey’d on their very Vitals’.73 Her indictment of social and legal injustice in the Chancery scandal is as powerful as anything to be found in Memoirs, and its axis is a cluster of stories of abuse linked by the wicked greed of a pair of villains. Sarpedon clearly stands for Macclesfield in his role as Lord Chancellor, for he holds an ‘Office’, we are told, that permits him to ‘dispossess

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those of their Estates which seem’d to him unlawfully to be detain’d’.74 The other villain, Maltolius, identified as ‘Head of the Senate’ and chief of the commission of inquiry, is not named in the key but is almost certainly Sir Spencer Compton, speaker of the Commons and from 1722 holder of the lucrative post of paymaster general. He is said to have accumulated £100,000 over an eight-year period.75 The section opens with a powerful visual image of bribery: Sarpedon counts out a ‘vast’ quantity of gold and Maltolius, eyes glittering with greed, ‘stretches wide’ the ‘huge’ bag to ‘make it hold yet more’.76 The stories of female abuse that follow lay bare the vulnerabilities of women within the legal system that, contra the episode of the Counterfeit Heroine, was anything but a friend to wives. Most striking is the story of a virtuous married woman tricked out of her rightful identity as a wife and mother by Maltolius and subsequently unable to find justice through the law. Out of context it might seem a generic tale of virtue betrayed by male perfidy, but read in relation to the Macclesfield scandal, the story is seen to address the corruption at Chancery in both particular and abstract ways: it exposes the sacrifice of particular women and children to the greed of men legally constituted their protectors; more abstractly, it exposes the betrayal of the ideals of social justice embodied in the institution of Chancery. Connecting the two levels is a mesh of legal metaphors and double entendres that play upon the overlap in meaning between court (in the legal sense) and courtship (in the romantic sense), between legal and romantic/conjugal arrangements. A virtuous woman at first disdains Maltolius’s ‘Suit’ but is persuaded to marry him in a private ceremony. She bears two children, to all the world bastards, but reserves ‘her Complainings’ for her prayers and makes no effort ‘to redress [her] Grievances’, confident that in due course he will do ‘public Justice’ to her and her children. But she learns that he is ‘making his Court’ to another woman and, worse, papers are being drawn up for a marriage settlement. Recognizing that her children have ‘no other Friend to take their part’ – the language echoes contemporary descriptions of Chancery as ‘friend’ to the powerless – she decides to use the law to expose the ‘whole History of his Perjury and Ingratitude’.77 The story now takes an Orwellian turn. She discovers that the ink used to inscribe her name on the marriage document ‘would not retain its Blackness’ and as a result ‘there now remain’d not the least tincture on the Parchmont that any thing had ever been written there’.78 The literal disappearance of her name along with all traces of the ink signifies with chilling force her lack of presence within the legal system. The implications of feme covert, the idea that ‘husband and wife are one person in law’ and he that one, are here laid bare: her legal existence has vanished and, all protections gone, she is a lawfully wedded wife in her own mind only. Little wonder that she is ‘like one bereft of Reason’ and languishes in a ‘Condition little different from Madness’.79 The situation recalls The Distressed Orphan (1726), the novella published the following year, where

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the orphan of the title finds herself imprisoned in a madhouse at the whim of her scheming male relations, her legal identity annihilated. (She is named, most aptly, Annila.) The wife in the Maltolius story – who has no name – discovers the limits of the resources and legal protections available to her within a social system that bends the administration of ‘justice’ to suit the interests of men of wealth and power. The symbol of the vanishing ink suggests very powerfully the difficulties facing women who look to the law for protections. The two stories featuring Sarpedon involve an exchange of sex for a fraudulently confiscated estate. In each a virtuous woman is put in the morally impossible position of using her body, the only resource at her command, on behalf of her family. The outcome in each case is disastrous. In the first, a daughter gives sex in exchange for the promise of the return of the estate unlawfully taken from her father, but once Sarpedon satiates ‘every lawless Wish’, he fails to deliver. Her broken-hearted father dies rejecting her; her siblings learn that those who walk ‘Paths of Virtue’ are destined to lose in the vastly unbalanced struggle against wealth, power, and legally constituted injustice. In the second, a virtuous wife is reduced to poverty and despair when an estate is unlawfully confiscated. After having two children by Sarpedon, she is left to perish and warned of the ‘Punishment the Law inflicts on Women who are abandon’d enough to claim fictitious Fathers for their spurious Offspring’.80 Legal writers in England during this period ‘never tired of claiming that women were “a favourite of the law”’, according to a historian of women and property law, ‘despite the fact that the legal restrictions placed on English women … were exceptionally severe even by the standards of other early modern European countries.’81 As seen earlier, the tale of the Counterfeit Heiress would have it that English laws favour wives, at least those with spirit to complain, but other tales in Memoirs speak other truths. Story after story lays bare a failure of female redress and reveals an arrogance of power that leaves lives broken in its wake. Put another way, these stories reveal the failure of institutions (Chancery) and social structures (the family) to sustain women. Haywood seems to imply the more radical message that virtue is ineffectual in such a world. The Macclesfield stories show strong empathy with the suffering of men and women of the middling orders, ordinary wives and daughters, not just the artless abandoned ingénues, and they represent the injustices visited upon entire nameless families touched by the Chancery scandal and evoked in these stories about virtuous but ruined and discarded daughters, rigid fathers, and traumatized brothers and sisters. All of this points to a feature of Haywood’s literary practice that might be called, in today’s parlance, ‘citizen journalism’. Her scandal fictions bear witness to the injustice visited upon ordinary people whose suffering and grievances are overlooked by those in power: ‘whatever stands in need of protection’, she wrote almost two decades later in The Fortunate Foundlings, ‘merits protection from

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those who have the power to give it’.82 Real protection is beyond the powers of narrative, but stories are at least able to deliver the consolations of representation (such as they are) to power’s victims. A predator like Maltolius, who is exempt from earthly justice, can at least be brought to a fictive punishment fashioned out of materials at the amatory writer’s disposal, by being made to dote upon a heartless beauty who showers her sexual favours everywhere but on him: thus is a ‘gall-dipt Shaft’ plunged into his heart by the ‘unerring hand of Justice’.83 Recourse to the compensatory pleasures of revenge fiction is arguably an admission of defeat or, more accurately perhaps, an indication of a shifting in the moral terrain in the new culture of sanctioned self-interest. A decade and a half earlier, Manley claimed for herself the satirist’s traditional role as the scourge of vice: ‘’Tis an Action of Vertue to make Examples of vicious Men. They may, and ought to be upbraided with their Crimes and Follies: Both for their own Amendment, if they are not yet incorrigible; and for the Terror of others, to hinder them from falling into those Enormities, which they see are so severely punish’d in the Persons of others’.84 But in the post-Bubble world Haywood has lost faith in what Manley calls ‘the Poet’s Office’ to punish. So thoroughly are evil and corruption engrained in the institutions of the country – political, financial, economic and even legal – and so deeply has the lust for wealth penetrated into the very fabric of the legal system that the satirist can no longer hope for much in the way of amendment. She continues to expose the enormities of the perpetrators, as satirists will do, but also introduces something distinctively modern: a strain of compassionate sensationalism that seeks to cultivate feeling for the sufferings of the obscure, helpless, and vulnerable. This affective innovation is connected to but goes beyond her oft-noted sympathy for the ruined ingénues of the amatory fictions. Memoirs of a Certain Island is infamous for the malice of its personal attacks, but it is more importantly a pioneering contribution to the rise of literary sensibility. Its implicit credo – justice to the suffering victims – forecasts a number of modern forms of storytelling ranging from tabloid journalism to celebrity voyeurism to police procedurals to popular forms of ‘ripped-from-the-headlines’ television detective fiction. Memoirs is ill-understood and grossly underappreciated as a political text. The work itself has been overshadowed by the grotesque portrait of its author in The Dunciad, but read on its own terms as political satire, Memoirs arguably rivals and in some ways surpasses Pope in the force of its vision of national corruption. Critics sympathetic to Haywood have rightly insisted on the political content of this roman à clef but without a comprehensive understanding of the patterns of personal and topical reference informing the work as a whole, the result is decontextualised readings distorted by the effort to maintain the received view of Haywood as an anti-Walpole Tory. Closer attention to the actual people,

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events and situations to which the stories are keyed confronts us with a less conventionally ‘oppositional’ narrative but one that is more richly imagined and serious of purpose than has been recognized. Macclesfield was found guilty in May. Memoirs was published late October. The Sarpedon/Maltolius section was probably written several months earlier, for it comes early in the volume and is threaded with gossip about the public quarrel between Lady Bristol and Molly Hervey, which dates from February. Cupid professes himself baffled to explain why the Island’s inhabitants ‘have not join’d to drive him’ – Macclesfield – ‘out from Posts of Trust and Power’.85 Had she wanted to, Haywood could have revised this passage and others to reflect Macclesfield’s fall from power. She might have inserted a crowing celebration of the toppling of the mighty, perhaps. But she let the Chancery-inspired stories stand in all their bleakness. Perhaps she recognized that the Chancellor’s punishment was mild and not worthy of celebration – he managed to pay his £30,000 fine after only six weeks in the Tower – or perhaps she was less interested finally in facts than in their allegorical application. She did not seek to deliver a ‘true history’ of the Earl, that is to say, but rather to tell a story about gross abuses of sex, money, and power in a society maddened by the effects of speculative wealth. That Macclesfield goes unpunished in her version may also say something about the failure of her society to protect the vulnerable, and its larger failure to understand the economic and social changes that were creating new kinds of exposure and vulnerability for women. But for whatever reason, Haywood chooses to explore dark truths about the inadequacy of virtue in a political, social, economic, and legal order that is revealed to be systemically corrupt.

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3 THEATRICAL THIRTIES: 1729–37

Around 1729, Haywood began redirecting her energies towards the theatre, and it was probably at this time that she entered into friendly relations with two playwrights, William Hatchett and Henry Fielding, who would figure importantly in her professional life for the next two decades. She did not leave off print production altogether during the 1730s. In addition to Eovaai, discussed in the next chapter, she published a ‘sequel’ to her very popular upmarket translation La Belle Assemblée, which appeared in 1734 under the title L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits, and a volume of theatre commentary entitled The Dramatic Historiographer (1735).1 All appeared anonymously. The sparseness of her print output combined with information collected in The London Stage suggests that she had thrown herself into the theatre in the 1730s, and was more heavily involved in the day-to-day activities of the playhouse than at any time since the summer of 1723, when she played the leading role in A Wife to be Lett at Drury Lane. The old view that the ‘torrent of filthy abuse’ in The Dunciad cut deeply into Haywood’s psyche and inflicted lasting damage on her career no long prevails.2 Students of the career now recognize that far from being silenced, Haywood not only survived but thrived in the immediate post-Dunciad period. It can now be added that it makes good professional sense that she would return to the stage in the late 1720s. The breakaway success of Beggar’s Opera in 1728 had re-energized the theatre and boosted the professional prospects for playwrights and players alike. Haywood’s first response to the expanded opportunities seems to have been a play designed to appeal to the royal family. In March 1729, a little over a year after the The Beggar’s Opera had become in Fielding’s words ‘the whole Talk and Admiration of the Town’, her tragedy Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh was staged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.3 The following year she took the lead role in Hatchett’s The Rival Father at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, the theatre with which she would be associated throughout the heady pre-Licensing Act days that ended in April 1737. Some have seen her return to the stage as a calculated attempt to trade on the notoriety conferred by The Dunciad and there may be some truth in that, but the full story cannot be told without reference to developments in the London thea– 55 –

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

tre. Robert Hume has pointed out that playhouses were experiencing a ‘boom triggered by the unprecedented success’ in 1728 of the The Beggar’s Opera, the result being ‘heated competition, with up to six companies operating simultaneously’, something that had not been seen ‘since before 1642’.4 The 1727–8 season was pivotal. The coronation of George II on 11 October ‘brought the beau monde to town earlier than usual and made daily performances worth while’. Starting in January the Vanbrugh-Cibber Provok’d Husband ran for twenty-eight straight nights at Drury Lane; at Lincoln’s Inn, The Beggar’s Opera began its sensational run of thirty-two straight nights and by season’s end there had been all told sixty-two performances. This astonishing season ‘demonstrated conclusively that London had a large, hitherto almost untapped audience’.5 Haywood’s return to the stage coincided, in other words, with a remarkably yeasty period in the theatre and may have been unrelated to the infamy she had achieved as an object of Pope’s anti-Grub Street satire. Existing scholarship has barely begun to tell the story of Haywood’s career as an actress. This chapter provides the first detailed overview of her on-stage activities in the 1730s, focusing on the Little Theatre in the Haymarket where she worked closely with two playwrights who could not be more different in cultural status. Fielding, known today as author of The History of Tom Jones (1749) and other novels, was London’s foremost playwright and manager of the ‘Great Mogul’s’ company during the 1737 season. Hatchett, a perpetually aspiring playwright and sometime player, puffed up but culturally insignificant, described himself as a ‘little, trifling, Man of No Consequence’.6 This ironical self-appraisal seems borne out by the sole biographical account to survive from his own century, which records that he was a ‘performer on stage’ but not a successful one: ‘he seems never to have arisen to much eminence in that profession’.7 He has begun to attract attention of late as Haywood’s collaborator and long-term companion; they are often said to be lovers or she his mistress. The discussion that follows takes up some of the puzzles of the Hatchett-Haywood association and it also shines a light on the ups and downs of her ill-understood relationship with Fielding. We begin, though, with a brief look at her failed tragedy Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh, another of the works from this period that has been misidentified as an ‘anti-Walpole’ political piece.

Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh Haywood’s first attempt to capitalize on the new opportunities in the London playhouses came early in 1729 when her historical tragedy Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh was staged at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It played for only three nights, March 4, 6 and 8. In the preface to the printed version, Haywood expresses disappointment that the play met with an ‘indifferent Reception’ in spite of the

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‘high Expectations the Town had conceived of this Performance’.8 Performances had been scheduled to coincide with observances of Queen Caroline’s birthday and one surmises that Haywood expected Frederick to be included in the festivities. But alone among the season’s new offerings and despite the explicit appeal to Brunswick family pride – the title character was their ancestor, the first Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh – the play was not honoured by the presence of the royal family. The ‘unthinking Part of the Town’ concluded that it had either been built upon ‘a fabulous Foundation’ or had misrepresented the hero and thus displeased the royal family. She insisted she had followed her historical sources as faithfully as drama would permit and intimated that those enemies of whose existence she remained keenly aware even as late as 1729 were still plotting to sink her – reports of royal displeasure were ‘industriously spread Abroad by some, whom I have not been fortunate enough to please’ – and, in typical fashion, she refused to apologize: ‘there have been as ill Plays acted, with much better Fate’.9 If Haywood’s work in the 1720s is read backwards through her later oppositional writings, it is easy to discover anti-ministerial meanings where none or few were intended. The usual assertion that Frederick reflects Haywood’s antiministerialism is an example of such a retrospective reading. The dedication of the printed version to Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales is read as politically significant, but the choice of the Prince at this date was probably not politically motivated. It would be many years before Frederick would become an opposition hero; he would begin to associate with the Patriot cause after the general election of 1734 and would not go over to the opposition openly until 1737.10 In March 1729 he had been in the country for under three months. Raised in Hanover, he had arrived without ceremony the previous December to face intricate difficulties. Just shy of twenty-two, a stranger to the court and London society – and to his parents, for that matter – unschooled in the complexities of the patronage system and treated by his famously unloving parents as if he were one of his younger siblings (they refused him a house of his own and granted him only a meagre allowance), he was obliged to try to win over his parents.11 One of his biographers writes that in those first months his ‘greatest wish was to be reconciled with his family’ and he sought ‘by dutiful and exemplary conduct towards his parents to mollify their resistance, not to say dislike of him’.12 From an account in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal for 8 March 1729 we learn that in the birthday observances he played the part of the dutiful son: ‘dress’d vastly fine’, he ‘led the Queen to the Room of State’. Assessments that associate Frederick with the opposition in 1729 misrecognize his actual position, in other words. Only studied inattention to chronology, to say nothing of historical context, permits a reading in which the play can be seen as revelatory of its author’s ‘realization that the Prince of Wales would be neither a patron, nor the political savior the opposition was attempting to mythologize’.13 Far from regarding Frederick as the usefully estranged elder

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son of George II and Caroline, Haywood seems instead to have him pegged as her entrée into royal favour, a miscalculation that betrays a lack of knowledge about Brunswick family politics. She should perhaps be taken at her word when she says in the Preface that she had ‘little Interest with any Person proper to make an Application in my Behalf ’, that is, to the royal family. The dedication begins by congratulating the Prince on having always before him ‘shining Models, in your Own Parents, of all that can illustrate Royalty’, and later reminds him ‘from what a Race of Hero’s you are deriv’d, and that you are the immediate Offspring of a George and Caroline’.14 Frederick was always the ‘more obvious focus for Hanoverian sentiment than either of his parents’, Christine Gerrard observes, but the process of idealizing him as the ‘people’s prince’ would come later.15 Indeed, Eovaai (1736), as will later be seen, represents one of the opposition’s earliest sustained attempts to promote the cult of Patriot Kingship that would take Prince Frederick as its public face.

William Hatchett, Parnassian Gentleman The beginnings of Haywood’s close if not entirely intelligible association with Hatchett cannot be precisely dated but it can be said that no evidence has surfaced to indicate they were acquainted any earlier than 1728 or 1729. She subscribed to two copies of his Morals of Princes, a translation said to be in production as early as January, and since this is not the sort of thing she ordinarily did, the gesture is indeed suggestive of special interest.16 Hatchett – fringe player, playwright, pamphleteer, translator, ghostwriter of letters and verses, soi-disant Parnassian gentlemen and layabout-and-sponge – has achieved spotlighted status in recent biographical accounts as Haywood’s long-time companion. They are thought to have lived as domestic partners if not lovers for the rest of her life, and he is often named father of the second of her two supposedly illegitimate children. These claims may be true, but the evidence is sparse (in the case of the paternity claim, practically nonexistent); even the nature of their living arrangements turns out to be uncertain. Much of our knowledge of Hatchett comes from two autobiographical pamphlets published a decade apart, one from 1731 and the other from 1742, and while fascinating in themselves for what they tell us about Hatchett’s half-mad self-fashioning, they are frustratingly unforthcoming on the subject of his connection with Haywood. Indeed, so far as I can tell, she figures nowhere in either account. Patrick Spedding, who has done more than anyone to give him a biography, including a c. 1701 birth date and Yorkshire origins, is nonetheless right to say that Hatchett ‘deserves considerably more attention from Haywood scholars than he has yet received, because it seems highly likely that the more research that is conducted on Hatchett the more we will learn of Haywood’.17 His own biographical investigations have

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thrown invaluable light on Hatchett and thus to some degree on Haywood as well, and it is now possible to add detail to the description from 1764 of Hatchett as a ‘gentleman with whom she appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’. If Haywood and Hatchett became close around 1728 or early 1729, as seems likely, she would have been perhaps thirty-five and he twenty-seven or thereabouts. As a new-on-the-scene translator, he demonstrates a level of energy inconspicuous in later years when he seems to have been chronically short on money and enterprise. In 1728 he published two translations with signed dedications, The Adventures of Abdalla (the title page has 1729) by Jean Paul Bignon with a dedication to ‘Lord Walpole’, and Advice from a Mother to her Son and Daughter (the title page has 1729), by the Marquise de Lambert with a dedication to the Countess of Gainsborough. These were followed shortly thereafter by Morals of Princes: Or, An Abstract of the most Remarkable Passages Contain’d in the History Of all the Emperors Who Riegn’d in Rome by Giovanni Battista Comazzi (the title page has 1729), with a dedication to the Duke of Bedford – a trio of translations in under six months, all published by Thomas Worrall. The surprisingly distinguished subscription list of Morals of Princes, 180 subscribers strong by Spedding’s count, included about one-third aristocrats as well as people from theatrical circles, among them Aaron Hill, ‘Mr. Fielding’ (probably the actor, not the playwright), Mrs Oldfield, Lady Lucy Price and John Rich. Haywood subscribed to Morals of Princes at around the same time she was preparing for what would turn out to be the disappointing performance of Frederick at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The ‘close literary intimacy’ said to have characterized their relation first blossomed, it appears, in the production of Hatchett’s The Rival Father; or, The Death of Achilles at the Haymarket in April 1730, where Hatchett undertook the role of Achilles and Haywood that of his cast-off mistress. The Trojan tragedy was Hatchett’s first produced play. It was performed April 8, 9, and 22 and advertised as published 23 April with a dedication to the Earl of Gainsborough. In the playbills the pair received marquee treatment: an advertisement in The Craftsman, 4 April 1730, announced that the part of Achilles was played by ‘the AUTHOR’ and that of Briseis ‘by Mrs. ELIZA HAYWOOD’.18 She also delivered the epilogue. The commanding role of Briseis, worldly and passionate, ‘could have been written with her in mind’.19 Indeed, one suspects that Hatchett wrote the play as a vehicle for the two of them. The prologue, ‘Written by a Friend’, calls attention to the ‘unskill’d’ first-time playwright and his stage partner ‘Eliza’: Our unskill’d Author too, who ne’er before The Warrior’s Truncheon graspt, nor Buskin wore, Your Favour for his first Attempt t’ engage, Assumes, hard Task! Achilles on the Stage.

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood To play Briseïs while Eliza deigns, All will be Real, that she only feigns.20

Some have caught in that allusion to feigned passion a wink-and-a-nod reference to an off-stage affair. Hatchett may have gone to some trouble in mounting the production for the advertisements refer to new costumes and scenery, which could represent considerable expense, and suggest an uncharacteristic degree of professional vigour. Perhaps he was trying to impress her. According to at least two contemporary accounts, including one by her friend Chetwood, in 1733 they collaborated on the successful ballad-opera Opera of Operas (1733), an adaptation of Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies (1731) which was itself based upon Tom Thumb (1730).21 They probably collaborated in some fashion on Arden of Feversham (1736), the well-known tragedy probably revised by Haywood for performance at the Haymarket in January.22 Other good candidates for collaborative effort include the Haymarket after-piece The Female Free Mason (1732) and the politically risky Rehearsal of Kings (1737), thought to be written by Hatchett.23 In the early forties they would certainly work together on a translation of Claude Crébillon’s erotic poem Le Sopha, to be taken up shortly. It is almost by chance that we know about their work on Le Sopha, as Spedding has demonstrated in a fascinating article; doubtless other collaborations occurred over the years.24

‘A Relation of Close Literary Intimacy’ For the origins of Hatchett’s current reputation as Haywood’s domestic intimate we must turn to two brief and possibly deliberately opaque eighteenth-century biographical entries. The first is a sentence in the ‘Heywood’ entry in the 1764 Companion to the Play-House (Hatchett did not get an entry of his own) which mentions him as a ‘gentleman’ with whom Haywood ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’, which could mean anything from a sustained literary collaboration to a sexually intimate partnership that included collaboration. He got a meagre entry of his own in the 1782 revised edition (having died, presumably, in the interval), where he is a stage performer who failed to achieve ‘eminence in that profession’. It is here that we learn that he ‘lived’ with Haywood ‘upon terms of friendship’. These are standard sources and were surely read by early biographers, but nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts declined to follow up on the suggestion of a sexual liaison, perhaps out of motives of protective delicacy or even perhaps perplexity as to their purport. The DNB mentions him only as her collaborator on Opera of Operas and Whicher calls him ‘her friend’.25 In 1989 Thomas Lockwood in a burst of robust indelicacy upgraded Hatchett from shadowy friend to ‘lover and living partner of many years past’ and, picking up on one possible implication of the early sources, described Haywood as his ‘mistress’.26 The idea quickly took hold and spawned a round of

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speculative assertion, some of it fairly reckless. The most questionable, although it is has achieved the status of settled fact in some quarters, is that the ‘two Babes of Love’ glossed in Curll’s key to The Dunciad as the ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’ imply that Hatchett is the father of the second of her bastard children (by the same logic Savage, a poet, is father of the first), although the reasoning is hard to follow since Hatchett was not a bookseller and no evidence exists to link them prior to early 1729 by which time, according to one of Haywood’s letters, she was already supporting two children, whom she described as the issue of ‘an unfortunate marriage’.27 On no more evidence than this, recent accounts seldom fail to name Hatchett as the father of her youngest child. Regarding the nature of their relationship and living arrangements, there is not much to go on beyond the understandable desire of biographers to give her life, although we do learn a fair amount about Hatchett’s ‘delusions of consequence’ in a pamphlet printed for the author, An Appeal to all Lovers of their Country and Reputation (1731). Spedding places the pair together by 1730, but his only evidence, the Appeal, in some ways works against his case. This self-vindicating account of how the supposed nephew of the Cardinal de Fleury, one Monsieur de Montaud, putative possessor of certain state secrets, inveigled his way into Hatchett’s lodgings has been wittily characterized as a ‘bizarre coffeehouse intrigue pumped up into an affair of state, with delusions of consequence à la Eustace Budgell’.28 (Certainly its author’s claim to have access to state secrets has never been corroborated.) The story Hatchett tells gives the impression that he was living as a bachelor possibly in the Charing Cross area during the period from July to October 1730. He was in the habit, evidently, of frequenting Slaughter’s Coffee House on the west side of St Martin’s Lane, a favourite resort of the artists in the neighbourhood (including at one time Hogarth) and of Frenchmen generally, a circumstance which helps explain how he came into contact with Montaud and fell victim to the Frenchman’s ‘Talkative Propensity’.29 Eventually Montaud managed to talk his way into Hatchett’s living space, described with an absence of helpful detail as ‘my Lodgings’ and a few pages later as ‘an Apartment in the House’. Hatchett represents himself as cajoled out of loans amounting to £30, a not inconsiderable sum, resulting from ‘bringing him Home at my own Expense’.30 Spedding implies that Haywood and Hatchett were living together at this time, without offering any evidence, and while there is nothing in the pamphlet to exclude that possibility, neither are there details to establish or even point towards her presence. Spedding concludes on the basis of Hatchett’s selfreported bounty – the £30 forked over to Montaud for his support – that he was ‘sufficiently affluent’ to support Haywood as well and speculates in consequence that she ‘had little cause to work’ during this period. This surmise is then used to ‘explain the gap in Haywood’s production in the period 1730–33’ and to prepare the way for the further speculation that she devoted this time to her motherly

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duties.31 The possibility of a maternally attentive Haywood under Hatchett’s care is just possible, of course, but given what can be inferred of their characters, the thought will strike many as laughable. A second self-exculpatory pamphlet, A Remarkable Cause, on a Note of Hand, written by and printed for Hatchett in early April 1742, gives fascinating glimpses of Haywood’s long-time companion a decade later now fancying himself ‘one of those Gentlemen, whose Estates lye in the imaginary Regions of Parnassus’.32 He emerges a would-be wit and self-serving layabout habituated to unrepentant insolvency and possessed of a well-developed sense of entitlement. One is reminded inevitably of Savage, another younger man in Haywood’s life. Interestingly, while Hatchett prides himself on his imaginary Parnassian estates, he was not above ‘ghosting’ items for actual gentlemen of lesser literary skill. He includes in the pamphlet a bill listing his charges for, among other things: twelve ‘genteel Dunning’ letters, two ‘very long’ letters in justification of a breach of match and four ‘Letters of Gallantry to a young Lady in Town’.33 A Remarkable Cause, which sold for a shilling at Fame and ‘the rest of the pamphlet shops’, would seem a maladroit or even buffoonish effort to get clear of a debt of £56 of some five years standing owed to an old Yorkshire schoolfellow, one Bryan Dawson. The story as it can be pieced together from A Remarkable Cause is that Hatchett cheerfully sponged on the more deeply pocketed Dawson when the two travelled together in the summer of 1736. Five years later, still unreimbursed, Dawson took out a writ demanding its return. Spedding thinks A Remarkable Cause was intended to embarrass Dawson into dropping his demands. It is written in the form of a mock trial and includes a cast of dramatis personae bearing such names as Flint Savage (a counsel invented for Dawson) and Impartial Tenderman and Sir Justin Reason (counsels invented for himself ). The fictive verdict is rendered in Hatchett’s favour which is unsurprising given that he set himself up to be counsel, judge, and jury in his make-believe court – his ‘Pocket’, he says breezily, not enabling him ‘to linger for Relief in a Court of Equity’.34 Whether Dawson ever got the money owed him is anyone’s guess. Regarding Hatchett’s domestic circumstances A Remarkable Cause is, once again, scant of usable detail, although it must be reiterated that there is nothing to imply a shared living arrangement with Haywood. In November 1741 he was living in ‘Lodgings’ where he was visited by ‘genteel People’, but the same sentence includes the information that a visitor professed surprise that ‘a Person arriv’d to the Defendant’s Time of Life’ – Hatchett would have been around forty – ‘should not be in better Circumstances’.35 Such a detail, along with additional particulars that he can ‘neither raise, nor earn, a Shilling, beset as I am’, are expected in an effort to self-depict as the proverbial bloodless turnip.36 But what is to be made of the other unflattering views of himself, as when he reports Dawson’s observation that he ‘must not have behaved himself well, since he is

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not richer’? – or, contrariwise, that he did ‘eat and drank, and did not look like a Starveling’.37 One does at least pick up on the character of a man who feels that ‘a poor Man under Oppression may be indulg’d to roar out a little’.38 He seems either to have settled quite comfortably into his Parnassian poverty or to be so thoroughly imbued with a sense of his own entitlement that he cannot conceive why he might be obliged to pay back a debt – or both. As he puts it with an insouciant logic perhaps meant to amuse: ‘there is nothing more Resonable [sic] than that a Debt, incurr’d for an Affair of Pleasure, should be paid at Pleasure’.39 The pattern of inconclusiveness regarding living circumstances that emerges in these two pamphlets is replicated in other possible references to their shared life. A deposition taken in connection with Haywood’s arrest in the late forties establishes that Hatchett and Haywood still worked together in December 1749, as others have noticed, but does little to illuminate their personal life together (or not). The bookseller Charles Corbett testified that Hatchett acted as Haywood’s agent in the distribution of the Henry Goring pamphlet. According to his testimony, an unnamed porter had delivered twenty-five pamphlets to his shop and the next morning ‘one Mr. Hatchett (who the Examt. has known many years)’ visited Corbett to confirm delivery. Hatchett reported that the pamphlets had come ‘from Mrs. Haywood who was sick in Bed’.40 There is nothing here to confirm or contradict the assertion that they lived together ‘upon terms of friendship’ but nowhere have I found independent corroboration of their life together as a ‘de facto couple’.41 And where is Haywood in all this? In an earlier stage of scholarship it had seemed that following the failure of The Rival Father at the Haymarket, Hatchett had ‘taken up some place behind [Haywood], whose career after all made much the better object of devotion than his own’.42 But with new information about Hatchett we can now reasonably suspect that he did not so much retire into the shadows cast by her more luminous celebrity as contrive to avail himself of her better honed breadwinning skills. By his own account he responded to the Dawson crisis by retreating for six months, ‘a Prisoner in his Lodgings’, during which period he appears to have made only spasmodic efforts to raise money.43 At one point he promises to pay down the first £10 of his debt, but then, astonishingly, insists he will require at least an additional thirteen months to pay the balance. Why? Because he has ‘no Opportunity of getting Money in the Summer, and he [Dawson] has made me lose too much of the Season to think of beginning Payment this Winter’.44 He cannot think of beginning payment for more than a year? It is hard to imagine anyone with a work ethic more diametrically opposed to Haywood’s than her Parnassian friend. The publication record is doubtless incomplete, but what remains is fairly damning with regard to Hatchett’s industry. We have a record of only three stabs at revenue. The first, in 1741, is a proposal for a subscription edition of

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his dramatic pieces that came to nothing.45 The second, from April 1742, is the Remarkable Cause itself, published six months after Dawson’s supposed ‘persecution’ began and thus not exactly a timely response. (Surely confinement to one’s lodgings need not have prevented production of vendible copy?) The third and most interesting in its implications is the joint translation with Haywood of Crébillon’s Le Sopha, with payments occurring between 8 March and 12 April 1742. In one of his more intriguing discoveries, Spedding has found that Haywood was paid double the rate received by Hatchett, a full guinea a sheet to his half-guinea, and what is more, receipts indicate that she did the majority of the work, five sheets to his four.46 Was this pattern typical? Was Haywood usually the more highly valued and reliably industrious of the two? As Hatchett was whinging in print about being too ‘beset’ to raise money, Haywood was operating a shop at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza and doing some publishing, seeing a twovolume publication through the press, and out-performing him as a translator. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, to the extent that Hatchett and Haywood were working partners, she was the partner who did most of the work. So what did Haywood get out of this relationship? It is hard to say, but one cannot rule out the possibility of sexual gratification. One might also consider the parallels already noted between Hatchett and Savage. Both were younger men, Hatchett some seven or eight years her junior, and neither betrayed that passion for writing that animated the young Haywood. Johnson’s description of Savage’s coming to authorship would seem to fit Hatchett as well: being obliged to seek some ‘Means of Support, and having no Profession, [he] became, by Necessity, an Author’.47 Both seem habituated to chronic indigence and disposed to present themselves as victims, aggrieved and misunderstood, and both were happy to accept a helping hand from women. At least three of Savage’s patrons, if we include Martha Sansom, were women. But one suspects Hatchett lacked Savage’s oft-remarked charisma. It is suggestive that for a stretch in the 1720s Haywood could not stop writing obsessively to and about Savage, but on the matter of Hatchett she seems never to have had anything to say. The crucial point about the Haywood/Hatchett relation is that she did not marry him. The history of writing women in the eighteenth century, the second half especially, is littered with stories of hard-working wives of wastrel husbands who plied their pens in a frantic effort to keep one step ahead of the creditors and put food into the mouths of the little ones. If Hatchett was the narrowly circumstanced improvident slacker that he appears to be on the evidence of The Remarkable Cause, then one must congratulate the widow Haywood on her good sense in not remarrying. Perhaps she had the prudence to protect herself from the legal entanglements of an idler husband who would certainly be a drain on her financial resources. Or perhaps she valued her independence. Virginia Woolf noticed in her review of the Whicher biography that in supporting herself, and

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possibly two children, Haywood ‘was striking out a new line of life and must have been a person of character’, and it is conceivable that the usual heterosexual heand-she arrangements were of little importance to her during this phase of her life, a possibility seldom if ever broached since Woolf gestured, fleetingly, in that direction.48 That Haywood and Hatchett had a long-term relationship seems undeniable, but whether those ‘terms of friendship’ or that ‘literary intimacy’ included sexual intimacy, we cannot know. But we know enough to conclude that the designation of Haywood as Hatchett’s ‘mistress’ is due for decommissioning. If anyone in that relationship ‘went into keeping’, it was William Hatchett.49

On Stage at the Haymarket Her appearance as Briseis in The Rival Father relaunched her career as an actress. In a snide poem from 1725 Savage jeered that she had always been ambitious for ‘Stage-Renown’, and although intended as an insult, the charge rings true. She probably relished her return to the stage.50 The Little Theatre in the Haymarket was a good venue for an actress of her capacities, for it was a small space able to accommodate offerings more offbeat than those at the two patent playhouses, although it would have been understood by Haywood’s contemporaries ‘to be a venue of second choice, where … an audience “might conceive some Prejudice against the Play, upon the Account of its being given to this Company”’.51 It was home to the Great Mogul’s company famously assembled by Fielding in the spring of 1737, before the Licensing Act closed the Haymarket and effectively ended both Fielding’s and Haywood’s careers in the theatre. Given the flamboyant figure Haywood cut on stage, it is surprising how few critics have looked at her performance career. An exception is Marcia Heinemann who, in a brief discussion, concludes that in the 1730s Haywood ‘played roles well suited to, indeed occasionally capitalizing on, her licentious reputation’. The ‘vitality and irrepressibility’ that mark her fiction are ‘confirmed in [the] externals of her career’.52 Study of Haywood on stage also throws light on the friendly relations that prevailed with her colleague at the Haymarket, Henry Fielding. It was once assumed that their relationship was one of mutual antagonism, but the hostility that unmistakably surfaces in their later work is not discernible until the forties and fifties when conflicting political alliances took them on divergent paths. They began as friends. They would have known each other from at least 1730, when they both worked at the Haymarket during a brief interval in which, as the oddity of circumstance would have it, Haywood shared the stage with her alter ego on alternate nights in early April. She had the leading role in The Rival Father, while on every other night her romance-writing public persona was being satirized in Fielding’s send-up of fashionable entertainments, The Author’s Farce, in the character of Mrs Novel. We may take this dual presence on

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the Haymarket stage as emblematic of Haywood’s high visibility in the London entertainment scene at this moment, a high-water time for her in many ways. It has been said, justly, that during the 1720s and 1730s ‘she reigned supreme as untiring chronicler of love, passion, and the vagaries of the heart’.53 She was England’s most acclaimed amatory author, the one other novelists imitated and strove to surpass, and she was enjoying a renewed career on the stage. Fielding’s good-spirited mockery of Mrs Novel hardly amounts to an opening salvo in a ‘twenty year war’, as John Elwood has argued, nor is it something for which she would later have to ‘forgive’ him, as Fielding’s biographers would have it.54 If critics are less likely these days to insist on a ‘war’ between these supposed literary foes, Mrs Novel is still taken sometimes to be a serious attack on Haywood’s person, reputation, or activities as a scandal writer, despite the fact that The Author’s Farce is clearly having fun with the silliness of her romances. The misrepresentation stems in part from the continuing investment in the image of a scandalous Haywood, but may owe something as well to the fact that a year previously Haywood’s public image had been subjected to a one-two satiric punch from Pope and then Savage, his Grub Street informant. First, Pope in The Dunciad Variorum tagged Haywood in a footnote as one of those ‘shameless Scriblers’ who exposes the ‘faults and misfortunes’ of their betters. That he was aiming at her scandal fictions specifically is confirmed by the names he supplies of her offending works, both recent scandal chronicles: the ‘New Utopia’, that is, Memoirs of a Certain Island (1724–5) and ‘court of Carimania’, that is, The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1726).55 Not two weeks later Savage, in his malicious pamphlet An Author to be Lett (1729), lavishes contempt on ‘divine Eliza!’ whom he smears in the ‘Publisher’s Preface’ as a greasy slattern specializing in filth and, in an echo of Pope, accuses of ‘scandalizing Persons of the highest Worth and Distinction’.56 It is therefore easy but misleading to lump Fielding’s spoof in with the attacks of the previous year. But Fielding was writing farce, not dark satire, and his target was Mrs Novel, not Mistress Scandal-Monger. The light, trifling pieces of amatory silliness spoofed in The Author’s Farce were well beneath the lofty heights of Pope’s offended righteousness or Savage’s sneering scorn. Fielding’s Mrs Novel dies in her first air ruefully, a virgin ‘for Love!’, while in a later air she courts a non-virginal death by sexual climax: ‘If you thwart my Inclination, / Let me die for Love again’.57 Indeed she dies repeatedly and in every conceivable fashion for love in a series of double entendres that glance at the ‘little death’ of orgasm while at the same time sending up the conventions of the Haywoodian amatory novel whose characters, like this one in Love in Excess, are endlessly dying: ‘I rave,—I burn,—I am mad with wild desires—I die, Brione, if I not possess him’.58 It is all engagingly preposterous and hardly grounds for imagining an enmity between two sophisticated professional writers. In the post-Pamela era, Fielding,

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now a novelist himself, would have reason to feel troubled by Haywood and the whole amatory strain of prose fiction for which she stood, and it is clear that he, along with other male entrants into the rapidly expanding field of popular prose fiction, Richardson most notably, was disturbed by the ‘femaleness’ of female writing. As Jane Spencer notes, Fielding ‘was careful to distinguish his own fictional enterprise’ both from the Richardsonian novel of ‘heroinely virtue’ and the ‘tradition of women’s romantic/scandalous fiction that Richardson himself repudiated’.59 Fielding certainly had Haywood in mind in 1742 when he used the prefatory chapter to Book III of Joseph Andrews to mock the ‘modern Novel and Atalantis writers’ of ‘surprizing Genius’ who consult neither nature nor history and ‘record Persons who never were, or will be, and Facts which never did nor possibly can happen: Whose Heroes are of their own Creation, and their Brains the Chaos whence all their Materials are collected’.60 But in 1730 Fielding had no reason to regard himself then or in the imaginable future as a novelist and there is nothing in The Author’s Farce to suggest that his relations with his playhouse colleague were anything but congenial. Haywood was a successful public entertainer of some fifteen years standing. She was not one of her artless, deluded and dreaming heroines. She could be quite acerbic about the silly side of romantic love and, in her really cynical moments, ridiculed uninhibited expressions of female passion with an astringency bordering upon the cruel. It seems inconceivable that she would not have joined Fielding in laughing at the splendid excesses of Mrs Novel, while for his part Fielding is likely to have respected a fellow author in harness who had chosen, like him, to eat by her nonsense rather than starve by her wit. In 1737, Fielding invited Haywood to join the Great Mogul’s company. The Grub-Street Journal for 3 March names her, along with Charlotte Charke, Roberts, Jones, Lacy, and Tom Davies as among the ‘Company of Comedians dropt from the Clouds’ to perform ‘a New Dramatic Comi-Tragical Satire’ at the Haymarket, the first indication that she was acting at the Haymarket that season.61 Scholars describe the troupe as an assemblage of good, not great, players, a ‘competent, if not a stellar, group’, as the Battestins put it, and this raises the question of Haywood’s acting talents.62 She had the desire to be on stage and many theatre connections, but the parts she landed were few and far between, at least until she began working at the Haymarket in the 1730s, and by far her meatiest roles had been written by herself (Mrs Graspall in A Wife to be Lett) or Hatchett (Briseis in The Rival Father), and it is surely telling that neither of these starring vehicles survived beyond three nights. Her performance skills, it might be surmised, were modest – or perhaps her gifts were ill-suited to the requirements of stage-acting in that still highly mannered age.63 But two of her Haymarket roles suggest that, although she may have fallen outside the period’s conventional notions of acting excellence, she possessed a flair all her own for great romping fun on stage. One of the parts she played for Fielding was the role of the author’s Muse in Eurydice

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Hiss’d, the last play performed at the Haymarket that season and a benefit for Haywood. It was a role of endearing raunchiness, as will be seen. But it was not nearly so outré as the performance that preceded it by several years, her role as one of the mad lovers in Samuel Johnson’s The Blazing Comet. In March and April of 1732, for a total of six performances at the Haymarket, she played Lady Flame in Johnson’s The Blazing Comet: The Mad Lovers: or, The Beauties of the Poets, a philosophical fantasy in the sublime mode with music, dance, and swordplay. This piece of theatrical outrageousness, ‘a Dramatic everything’ as the playbills would have it, was the brainchild or ‘maggot’, as he might say, of probably the zaniest figure in Haywood’s world, the ‘other’ Johnson – Samuel Johnson of Cheshire, alias ‘Maggoty’ Johnson, alias Lord Flame, alias Wildfire, alias Fiddler Johnson, author of the improbable runaway 1729 hit Hurlothrombo, a ‘wonderful piece of satiric nonsense’ in Hume’s words, that ran to thirty-three performances.64 In The Blazing Comet Haywood played the mad lover Lady Flame opposite Johnson himself. Johnson is one of the century’s great eccentrics, famous in his home county of Cheshire as a violinist, dancer and dancing master, sharp wit (described by Isaac Reed as ‘a keen satirist even upon his best friends’) and possibly professional jester who favoured black velvet apparel and was admired for his ability to fiddle while manoeuvring about on stilts; in truth, ‘a man of singular oddities’.65 It is a fascinating moment, the one in which the career arcs of Johnson and Haywood crossed in 1732 in a series of performances in which she played the love-maddened, sexually enflamed Lady Flame and he, as Wildfire, played her fiddling lover-on-stilts. The role of Lady Flame was not one to be undertaken lightly. It tells us much about Haywood’s public persona that Johnson considered her for the role and even more perhaps about Haywood’s own irrepressible vitality, to use Heinemann’s terms, that she agreed to play it. The stage direction sets the tone – ‘Enter Lady Flame mad’ – and the opening lines give a taste of the madness to come: ‘’Tis vehement hot! Come down ye Rivers of Paradise, I’ll fly, with your fantastick Air come fan my Vitals’.66 Music plays and she runs about. There turns out to be, in fact, a good deal of running about – and more. At one point, feeling herself threatened by one of the male characters, she declares ‘I’ll not be taken by Force, I’ll fight for myself, / I am my own, my Owner lives within me’, / He that will have me, from myself shall win me’, and then, amazingly, draws a sword and rushes at her attacker ‘swell[ing] with Wrath, and burn[ing] like flaming Fire’.67 She sings (‘Come to my Window, / Sing fair Dorinda’), dances, and at one point begins to remove her clothes (‘my Gloves, my Box, my Fan … My Apron, Petticoat and Coif ’) in order to follow Wildfire’s injunction that she should ‘run about stark naked’.68 Her address to her lover is variously salacious. She longs to be alone with him, ‘sitting upon his Knee’ until ‘we are both out of breath doing nothing’.69 In her last appearance on stage, when she is at least partly undressed,

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she reminds Wildfire, who wants to ascend in stark naked raptures into the sky, that they are, after all, bodies. ‘Hold, hold, my Lord,’ she says, ‘I think I came into this World for something more than this; just now my Head is an Egg laid in the Nest of Love, and Cupid hovers over it, and will turn it addle: and before you kill me, do, do, sit upon it, and make it hatch an Angel; come, come, come, do, do; come, come’.70 Heinemann is surely right to say that the role of Lady Flame borders on ‘indecency’ and it is disappointing that no contemporary response to this performance has turned up.71 Perhaps Fielding recalled her gift for bawdy and innuendo when he put together the Great Mogul’s company four years later. In her on-stage high-spiritedness he may have recognized something of his own ‘exhilarating freedom from respectability’, as Lockwood has put it.72 They seem, indeed, to have been kindred spirits during the Haymarket years. In spring 1737, she played two roles created by Fielding: Mrs Screen from Historical Register (thirty-six performances) and the author’s muse in the afterpiece from 13 April, Eurydice Hiss’d (twenty-one performances), the latter a satire on Walpole attended by the Prince of Wales, who was famously observed by the Earl of Egmont to have clapped ‘when any strong passages fell’, ‘especially when in favour of liberty’. She also played the role of ‘First Queen Incog’ as part of the ‘Company of Comedians dropt from the Clouds’ in March, in Hatchett’s season-opening A Rehearsal of Kings, never published.73 In Historical Register she appeared as Mrs Screen, a ‘Haberdasher of all Wares’, who frequents auctions with an eye to buying cheap for a great sale of her own. The name and the implied corruption evoke Walpole, the screenmaster general as he was called in memory of the South Sea days, and Haywood played his surrogate in the famous auction scene in which she appeared with a possibly cross-dressed Charlotte Charke playing the role of auctioneer Christopher Cock.74 (It is not clear whether the irony of the author of Eovaai standing in for Walpole would have been appreciated by the audience, since her satire on him the previous summer had been published anonymously.) The scene presents the standard Patriot view of England under Walpole, where all things are for sale and virtue goes unvalued, politics and profit are thoroughly entangled, and the desire for acquisition drives everything. In their political vision, at this point, Haywood and Fielding are like-minded. If Fielding wrote the part of the author’s Muse in Eurydice Hiss’d with Haywood in mind, we might surmise that an element of bawdy playfulness was part of their friendship. The role develops around a series of double entendres bandied about in what the bill promised would be ‘a fine Love-Scene’ between the playwright Pillage and last year’s Muse, ‘slighted for a fresher Muse’ this season.75 Many of the jokes turn on an equation between artistic inspiration and sexual coition, that is, pen/penis jokes. ‘My raptur’d Fancy shall again enjoy thee,’ Pillage affirms, and his Muse happily obliges with the risqué response: ‘Make ready

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then thy Pen and Ink’. There ensue further jokes about Pillage’s creative/sexual potency and the ability of his Muse to arouse both implements to vigorous activity. (He remembers a memorable day when her ‘blushing Charms’ yielded to his ‘vig’rous Fancy’ and inspired his pen to ‘write nine Scenes with Spirit in one Day’. His Muse responds with lubricious enthusiasm: ‘That was a Day indeed!’) It is ironic that some fifteen years later, the same woman who had performed the role of the cast-off Muse with what must have been raunchy verve would insert a paragraph in Betsy Thoughtless accusing the Fielding of the Haymarket days of trafficking in low humour, an episode to which we shall return shortly. The Licensing Act brought that politically edgy season at the Haymarket to a close on 23 May 1737 with a double bill of Historical Register and Eurydice Hiss’d performed for Haywood’s benefit. The papers gave it out that opposition icon Sarah Churchill, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough, would be in attendance.76 (Haywood had dedicated Eovaai to her the previous year.) When the Haymarket and other fringe theatres went dark, Haywood and Fielding pursued careers that took them into different niches in the increasingly complex ecosystem of print, although they intersected, or at least came into the same frame, now and then. But in spring of 1737, Haywood disappears for a few years – the longest undocumented period of her life. She had worked in and around the theatre most of the last decade and probably counted on staying on at the Haymarket. We know she had something in the works for that summer, for a bill of 13 June submitted by John Petter to the Lord Chamberlain indicates that she had been returned a deposit of four guineas applied towards some unspecified use of the ‘Little Theatre’ in the summer of 1737.77 The market for new plays in London had all but evaporated with the passage of the Licensing Act and she was evidently not of a calibre to perform at Covent Garden or Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so if she had a mind to continue working on stage she may have been forced to seek her livelihood outside London. Spedding thinks she may have ‘strolled’ with a travelling troupe; the fact that her comedy A Wife to be Lett was performed later that year in Norwich gives some support to the speculation.78 But Haywood’s whereabouts and activities following the closing of the Haymarket remain unaccounted for and we do not know what she did for the next few years. In June 1741, she published anonymously a satiric response to Richardson’s Pamela entitled Anti-Pamela: or, Feign’d Innocence Detected, not long after the first of Fielding’s two anti-Pamela offerings, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (April 1741).79 He would follow early the next year with The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (February1742). Thereafter, in a kind of pas de deux that deserves closer study, the two would continue to compete as novelists, or ‘historians’ as they styled themselves, pushing one another to develop more fully the range of new possibilities for pictures of contemporary life opened up by the Richardsonian novel – culminating in the partly dialogical The History of Tom Jones (1749) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) that together

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represent, along with Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) the crowning achievements of the mid-century novel. By this time their rivalry was no longer friendly. During the 1740s the erstwhile allies parted ways, politically speaking, and they remained antagonists to the end. As early as 1741 Fielding appears to have gone over to Walpole or at least broken with the opposition while Haywood, if her subsequent publications are any indication, was developing into an unswervingly anti-ministerial writer.80 A key event marking the growing divide between them was the formation in late 1744 of the Broad-Bottom ministry that, as its ‘ludicrously styled’ name would suggest, responded to nearly a decade of drubbing from Patriot critics (among them Fielding’s Eton friends, particularly the ‘Boy Patriots’ Lyttleton and Pitt, who had been clamouring for admission into the ministry) by establishing a government on a more broadly inclusive base – a ‘grand coalition of all parties’, as it has been sardonically tagged.81 Not coincidentally, it was at this time that some of Fielding’s friends and patrons became part of the ministry.82 At first Haywood was excited by the change of ministry – she celebrated the coming to power of the ‘Patriot Band’ in an ebullient Patriot effusion in Book 9 of The Female Spectator – but was quickly disillusioned and would soon align herself with the most extreme critics of the new administration, most visibly the paper Old England Journal. From the turn of 1744–5 until her death in 1756, Haywood would oppose every administration and consistently write on the side of exiles, outsiders and those excluded from power or, in the case of the Jacobites, those harassed or worse by power. Fielding during the first part of this period would be a ‘strenuous advocate for the ministry’, in his own phrase, and, as J. A. Downie has observed, from ‘1745 onwards into the 1750s, Fielding wrote on behalf of Whigs in government, whatever their complexion. He remained loyal … to Whigs in power’.83 Fielding was famously the scourge of Jacobites, while Haywood deployed a strategic Jacobitism that got her into trouble in 1749 when she was taken into custody on suspicion of having published an anti-government pamphlet. Haywood would continue to snipe at Fielding for the rest of her career. Fielding seems never to have engaged Haywood’s politics in print, at least not directly, but he did bring ‘B---- T----’, Betsy Thoughtless that is, to trial on charges of dullness in February 1752 in his periodical The Covent-Garden Journal and then acquitted the author on the grounds that she was, after all, a denizen of Grub Street from whom no more than dullness could be expected.84 It is a complex dismissal that nods at their shared professional bond but declines to elevate her to the status of a political antagonist, and thus delivers what feels like a calculated snub. Haywood had included in The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless a jaundiced piece of revisionist history of ‘F-----’s scandal-shop’ at the ‘little theatre in the Haymarket’: There were no plays, no operas, no masquerades, no balls, no public shews, except at the little theatre in the Hay-market, then known by the name of F----g’s scandal-shop; because he frequently exhibited there certain drolls, or, more properly, invectives against the ministry: in doing which it appears extremely probable, that he had two

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood views; the one to get money, which he very much wanted, from such as delighted in low humour, and could not distinguish true satire from scurrility; and the other, in the hope of having some post given him by those whom he had abused, in order to silence his dramatic talent … [T]he town is perfectly acquainted both with his abilities and success; and has since seen him, with astonishment, wriggle himself into favour, by pretending to cajole those he had not the power to intimidate.85

The ‘isolated irrelevance’ of this passage ‘seems to indicate some unexplained irritation on the part of its writer’, Austin Dobson was the first to note, and Fielding’s biographer has called it ‘a gratuitous interpolation’.86 But Haywood’s accusations in Betsy Thoughtless are familiar and have a known context. Fielding’s need for money, his eagerness to get himself bought off, his low scurrility, his recent success in managing to ‘wriggle himself into favour’ (the same expression was used by his old friend and now political antagonist James Ralph to smear him): these are the standard charges used by Fielding’s political enemies to besmirch his integrity, and they tell us that Haywood and Fielding had faced off publically as political adversaries. This should not, however, be permitted to obscure the equally important truth that back in the Haymarket days they were like-minded colleagues who shared friends and political interests and who were united in their love of bawdy stage-play and a mutual distaste for Walpole.

4 ADVENTURES OF EOVAAI

The Adventures of Eovaai (1736), a satirical-allegorical-Bolingbrokean-romantical oriental tale, has long been recognized as an effective and at times hilarious attack on Sir Robert Walpole. Recent criticism has admired its wildly hybridized literary qualities including the complex narrative structure, faux scholarly apparatus, generic experimentation and adroit manipulation of the conventions of the oriental tale, and Eovaai seems certain to draw increasing attention.1 It offers the first sure indication of Haywood’s alignment with the Patriot opposition. Up until this point her politics defy easy categorization and it is probably not inaccurate to say that in the 1720s and early 1730s she is not very political, at least in the narrow party politics sense of the word. But beginning in 1736 she will consistently array herself with the Country programme associated with its pre-eminent spokesman, Bolingbroke, against the powerful Court interests associated with Walpole (and, after 1742, his Whig successors); and she will write, how consistently is not clear, in support of the Hanoverian heir, Frederick, the Prince of Wales. The anti-Walpole thrust of the satire is well-known; almost unrecognized is its myth-making on behalf of Frederick, whose proxy in the text, Adelhu, rescues Princess Eovaai in fairy-tale fashion and thereby sets in motion a dénouement in which public virtue is restored to two kingdoms that had fallen into corruption and decline. With its swift and disorienting shifts between utopian and dystopian perspectives, meditations on governance and satiric indictment of a modernity that manifests in private luxury, crazed individualism and unashamed pursuit of self-interest, Eovaai looks back to the great Scriblerian satires of the previous decade and seems indeed closer in spirit to The Dunciad and Gulliver’s Travels than to the amatory romances and scandal chronicles with which it is more often compared. But it is also a work of Patriot propaganda, one of the earliest to promote Frederick as the ‘people’s Prince’. Rooted in the satiric 1720s, the narrative looks forward to the more redemptive themes of the cult of ideal kingship celebrated by the Patriot poets and playwrights in the final years of the 1730s. Eovaai is also an imaginative rethinking of the ‘advice’ or ‘mirror’ for a prince (in this case, princess) and should be read alongside Bolingbroke’s famous treatise The Idea of a Patriot King (1738). Although rarely encountered within the – 73 –

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same frame, these two nearly contemporaneous works belong to a tradition that included Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532) as well as more recent offerings such as Leibniz’s ‘Le Projet de l’éducation d’un prince’ (1693), Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699) and Defoe’s Of Royall Educacion, written in the late twenties but not published until much later.2 The flourishing of the ‘advice’ or ‘mirror’ genre in England reflects anxieties over the proper education of the country’s imported (and distrusted) German-born princes as well as Enlightenment beliefs about the ameliorative powers of education.3 But in the 1730s, the ‘advice’ genre spoke specifically to the Patriot programme of support for a royal Patriot – Frederick – who would unite the country and bring about a Bolingbrokean national renewal. Elizabeth Kubek describes Eovaai’s narrator as a kind of ‘alternative-universe Bolingbroke’ and argues that the narrative ‘deliberately fictionalizes and popularizes the political writings and theories’ of Bolingbroke, whose ‘ideas and goals inform the entire work’.4 Her enticing suggestion that Haywood visited Viscount Cobham’s country seat at Stowe is unconvincing – even Kubek admits there is no evidence that Haywood was known there – but we do know she was acquainted with some of the poets and politicians who gathered at Stowe. It seems possible that Eovaai represents a bid for favour from the Cobham circle, even perhaps from Frederick himself, and likelier still that Haywood was angling for consideration in some form from the recipient of the dedication, Sarah Churchill, the dowager Duchess of Marlborough. Her biographer reports that by 1735 the seventy-five-year-old Whig icon was ‘already beginning to draw into her circle the younger generation, the “cubs” of the opposition’ and the fact that it was given out in the papers the following year that the still-formidable Duchess was planning on attending a performance for Haywood’s benefit at the Haymarket suggests that the dedication may have done its work.5 It is even possible that Haywood wrote this Patriotic satire-romance on commission. In any event, one need not place Haywood among the lords and their followers at Stowe to imagine her plying her pen in the service of the second-wave of the opposition that in 1736 was coalescing around the Prince of Wales. Paula Backscheider has suggested that readers contextualize Eovaai ‘in relation to the royal family and not Walpole’s career alone’. She urges scholars to attend to the ‘political philosophies of the Walpole era’ in order to situate Eovaai ‘within the permutations of the opposition – or, perhaps more accurately, within their addresses to and relationships with Frederick’.6 I could not agree more. The discussion that follows attempts to work out Haywood’s position vis-à-vis the Patriot opposition in the mid-1730s. It argues that she drew upon Bolingbroke’s ‘ingenious’ marriage of ‘the majesty and assertiveness of Stuart kingship with the constitutionalism of the Revolution Settlement’ and made use of the conjunction of ‘Tory romance and Whig ideals’ that he proposes.7 But Haywood did more than allegorize Bolingbroke’s thought. She used the ‘advice to a princess’

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format to rethink from a Patriot feminist perspective some of his notions about the state as a patriarchal family served by a just and loving royal father. Using a variety of elements drawn from the conventions of political allegory, seduction tale, secret history, pornography, romance, oriental and fairy tale, she crafted a distinctively feminist critique of Bolingbroke’s paternalism. In her political romance, the image of monarchical paternalism – the idea that the ideal king is a virtuous father of his people – is replaced by a heterosexual conjugal model entirely her own.8 In the process she brings a fascinating Patriot feminist dimension to the themes of female curiosity and desire that had preoccupied her as an amatory novelist from the start.

Bolingbroke and the Patriot Opposition When Bolingbroke returned to France in 1735, wearied by the seeming futility of oppositional politics, he left behind a Patriot ‘movement’ that drew inspiration and much of its rhetoric from his work, particularly the recently published A Dissertation upon Parties (1734), which had first appeared as weekly essays in The Craftsman. Called by its editor ‘the greatest monument to Bolingbroke’s oppositional activities’, the Dissertation failed in its aim of uniting disparate elements of the opposition into a coalition that would cross party lines, but its high ideals ‘continued to animate many of his Patriot followers’.9 In addition to Haywood, these included Viscount Cobham at Stowe and his eager young nephews, George Lyttelton, George Grenville, and William Pitt, ‘Cobham’s Cubs’ or the ‘Boy Patriots’, the somewhat reckless young champions of Frederick voted into Parliament in 1734. (They attracted Pope’s approving attention. On 25 March 1736 he wrote to Swift: ‘Here are a race sprung up of young Patriots who would animate you.’)10 This same period also saw the emergence of a group of authors that included James Thomson, David Mallet, Richard Glover, Mark Akenside and Henry Brooke, poets and playwrights who conducted a loosely organized campaign, if it can be called that, on behalf of the Prince and the Patriot hopes for renewal he represented. The Patriot idiom and ideology was a ‘marvellous rhetorical basis for opposition in Parliament’; it inspired the ‘poetry, pamphlets, journal essays, and plays’ that the Boy Patriots and their ‘literary allies poured forth’ and ‘seemed to promise more than the uninspiring “politics as usual” that was so natural’ to older members of the opposition, to say nothing of Walpole.11 Haywood was energized by similar patriotic principles. The old opposition – associated with William Pulteney and John Carteret – was tired and floundering, having proven itself unable to capitalize on the unpopularity of the recently defeated excise bill. The ‘Boy Patriots’ and their literary followers represented hopes for the future. The new literary strategies they developed pointed toward a generational shift away from the corrosive wit of their Scriblerian predecessors towards something less

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abusive and more self-consciously positive, hortatory, uplifting and – in a word – patriotic.12 The Patriots believed their cause would be best served by writings that would ‘not only attack the degeneracy of the present age’ – à la Gay, Pope, and Swift – ‘but also look forward to a regenerated Britain, a renewal to political health with a Patriot ministry and under a Patriot King.’13 In 1735 Thomson dedicated the first of three parts of Liberty to the Prince of Wales. Frederick would not openly split with his father, George II, until 1737, but in 1734 he began to ally himself with the opposition and by 1736 was emerging in the press and popular sentiment as a glamorous alternative to his father, who was rapidly losing what little hold he had over the affections of his people. Early in 1737, Lord Hervey recorded that the king’s reputation ‘with all ranks of people’ had sunk to a new low; the ‘open manner in which they expressed their contempt and dislike, is hardly to be credited’.14 Rumours began to circulate about plans to replace the unpopular father with his beloved son, the ‘people’s prince’.15 Frederick’s recent wedding to Princess Augusta had prompted huge outpourings of public love and, a matter of no small consequence when it came to attracting useful supporters, his annual allowance had been raised to £50,000. An emboldened parliamentary opposition would move, unsuccessfully, to double that amount. (It would be raised to £100,000 only in 1742.) Three of the Boy Patriots – Lyttleton, Grenville, and Pitt – delivered ‘very remarkable’ congratulatory speeches in Parliament on the occasion of his marriage – speeches that in the words of Lord Hervey served to ‘insinuate, not in very covert terms, that the King had very little merit to the nation in making this match, since it had been owing to the Prince demanding it of his father, and the voice of the people calling for it too strongly not to be complied with’.16 These congratulations were widely read as part of the effort by the young Patriots to consolidate their alliance with Frederick. Not yet the rallying figure that he would become after 1737, Frederick nonetheless embodied the hopes of the literary opposition and was well on his way to becoming the public face of many of the various forces that ranged themselves against Walpole.

‘The People’s Prince’ Eovaai, with its improbable publication date of 17 July 1736, could not have come out at a more inauspicious time. Summer was usually the kiss of death for new titles, especially those with a political tendency, and in fact Eovaai was not a popular success. Claims have been made for its efficacy in toppling Walpole but they would be difficult to prove on the basis of sales. The 1741 reissue (as The Unfortunate Princess) consisted of remaindered stock. (Spedding reports that it ‘was printed only once but was given a new title in 1741 and reissued three times’.)17 Publication in July could not have helped. The release of new titles,

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especially political works, was usually timed for late October or November to coincide with the opening of Parliament and beginning of the London social season. One needs to ask, then, why Haywood and her publishing team chose to bring out a satire smack in the middle of the summer doldrums when all public business was at a standstill. The answer requires that we consider an event evoked at the close of the romance: the recent fairy-tale marriage of Frederick to Princess Augusta of Saxe Gotha on 27 April 27. The wedding of Frederick and Augusta, equal parts dynastic arrangement and political theatre, received perfervid attention in the oppositional press. Gerrard observes that Augusta was ‘seen by many as a double confirmation of Protestant securities and Old Whig liberties’ and cites an item in Old Whig, on 6 May 1736, which hailed Augusta as a princess ‘to protect the Liberties of Britain’.18 By July, the first flush of national rejoicing had passed, but during the preceding months the papers had been filled with notices of celebrations and congratulatory addresses, expressions of thanksgiving and demonstrations of joy, sermons preached and poetic tributes presented, and theatrical events attended. Newspaper verse expressed hope that Frederick would emerge ‘a Patriot Prince’ ‘Firm to his country’s ancient laws’ and friend to the ‘freeborn, upright, English soul’.19 An ode that made its way through the papers compared Frederick and Augusta favourably to Adam and Eve: ‘’Twas Theirs to curse the World, but You / Were born to bless Mankind’. The comparison to the ‘first wedded Pair’ is interesting in light of the names Haywood devised for her ‘pre-Adamitical’ royal couple, Adam/Adelhu (Frederick) and Eve/Eovaai (Augusta).20 The parallel is not hugely significant in itself but read in the context of other details these allusive names strengthen the impression that Adelhu, a brave and dashing Patriot prince in his own right, would have resonated for Haywood’s first readers as a stand-in for the recently married Prince Frederick. Eovaai’s sexual struggles and political education, her trials as a woman on her way to achieving the capacity to rule, have drawn the attention of readers today, and virtually all criticism devotes itself to pursuing the implications of the heroine’s political and erotic adventures. But Haywood’s first readers may have been more attuned to the royal ‘secret history’ dimension of the narrative, including sordid Hanoverian family details such as Adelhu’s enmity with his father and the chief minister, Ochihatou, who dispatches the prince to another kingdom to be murdered. Readers today may barely notice that Eovaai’s adventures are framed within the story of the ‘young Prince of great Expectations’ devoted to Patriot principles of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Good of the People’. They may not even notice that the final section of the narrative is entitled ‘The History of Adelhu’ and that it puts front and centre the brave prince’s heroism.21 He survives to slay a monster, save Eovaai from a terrible death, claim her heart and – in a signature touch – ‘gratify the Passion she was enflamed with for him’.22 They

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marry and unite their kingdoms. The story ends with reconciliation of son with ‘Royal Father’ who, happily, soon dies, to be succeeded by the newly wedded royal pair who together ‘compos’d the most powerful, most opulent, and most happy Monarchies in the World’.23 The implication, of course, is that a Patriot renewal will come with the ascent of a people’s prince who will oust a detested minister and replace an unloved father. The magnificent fairy-tale royal wedding at the close would seem then to represent an allegorical wish-fulfilment version of the opposition’s hopes for a redemptive Prince of Wales.24 The satire-romance in this reading is a Patriot fantasy intended to play to the anti-George II and proFrederick mood of the nation in the summer of 1736. Central to the narrative is the conflict between wicked magician Ochihatou and virtuous Patriot Alhahuza, easily identifiable as the contest between two real-life adversaries, Walpole and Bolingbroke, the latter described by his editor as ‘the most talented and mercurial of Walpole’s opponents’.25 Haywood uses plot, setting, characters, and political symbolism to portray the struggle between liberty and corruption in terms borrowed from Bolingbroke in his Remarks Upon the History of England (1730–1), published first in The Craftsman, which borrowed in turn from Machiavelli’s corruption theory. The country is in decline, having strayed from ancient ‘first principles’, and corruption is everywhere, from the luxury-driven pursuits of the people in private life to the system of bribery, stockjobbing, nepotism and heavy taxation that had come to dominate political-economic life. The narrative implicitly endorses a Machiavellian ritorno to virtue that would return the country to its ancient constitution and ideally balanced government – power distributed among king, nobles and ‘the people’ – and raise the sinking English spirit.26 The Machiavellian principle of ritorno structures and informs Eovaai on every level. It is played out most obviously in the story of Eovaai’s growth and education. It is a story of a fall into corruption and return to virtue that begins in a utopian Ijaveo still organized according to first principles but destined soon to fall, then moves to a deeply fallen Hypotofa that is transparently England under the Walpolean corruptive system, and finally returns to Ijaveo for a triumphal marriage that unites public and private in a return to wealth, power, and happiness. Eovaai herself is corrupted for a while by ‘abominable Principles’, but she too is restored to the principles of virtue ‘from which the Delusions of Ochihatou had made her swerve’.27 The contrast between ancient virtue and corrupt modernity is kept always before the reader. The ‘brave Roughness of more distant Ages’ is set against the ‘soft and silken’ ways of the present; the luxury-addicted people of Hypotofa are set against their ‘careful’ and ‘industrious Predecessors’, the plundering actions of ‘the mercenary Greatones’ are set against the ‘Liberty’ secured by their ‘glorious Progenitors’.28 The ritorno to first principles is played out in the allegorical clash of Ochihatou and his virtuous foe Alhahuza. The former is ‘a great Man’, a standard derisory epithet for Walpole, of course, as is the accusation of ‘mean’ birth that

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follows – ‘born of a mean Extraction, and so deformed in his own Person, that not even his own Parents cou’d look on him with Satisfaction’ – who is confronted by his ‘mortal enemy’, the Bolingbroke figure Alhahuza.29 Alhahuza is pointedly described as a ‘truly great Man’ and from a footnote we learn that his name signifies ‘A Complication of all Virtues, and particularly of Patriotism’.30 He will lead a ‘chosen Band’ in a rebellion that will result in the minister’s downfall although, interestingly, it is Eovaai who will ultimately deprive the minister of his evil powers by breaking his wand. The principle of ancient virtue informs the carefully constructed mise en scène associated with Alhahuza and by implication the ‘true Spirit of Patriotism’ that he embodies.31 The rugged simplicity of the castle where he lives in exile from the corruptions of court culture is part of the carefully elaborated political symbolism. It is built entirely of stone and attainable only by a steep ascent. (Bolingbroke wrote in the Author’s Preface to The Idea of the Patriot King that virtue is seated ‘on an Eminence. We may go up to her with ease, but we must go up gradually, according to the natural Progression of Reason, who is to lead the way and guide our steps.’)32 The castle is ancient but not ‘ruinated’; impressive in its ‘plain Magnificence’ but not bedizened with the gewgaws of modern luxury and pride – no paintings, or gilded carvings. The spacious hall of the Patriots within is filled with statues of the ‘true Sons of Fame, and worthy of the Name of Heroes!’. Eovaai enters after sounding the trumpet – that familiar symbol of fame – and thereby declares herself ‘now resolved to fly Corruption, and have an Abhorrence for Vice’.33 The moment marks the beginning of her return to first principles under the guidance of Alhahuza who – as Bolingbroke would soon attempt to do for Frederick in The Idea of A Patriot King – will guide her toward the tenets of good monarchical rule.

‘A Royal Allegory’ If Eovaai contributes, as I suspect, to a Patriot propaganda campaign on behalf of Frederick, then it should be read in conjunction with Thomson’s Liberty (1735– 6) as well as Lyttelton’s orientalized satire, Letters from a Persian (1735). But more even more compelling are its affinities with History of Titi (1736), the satiric faux-fairy tale that had created a sensation in the months before Eovaai came out. Subtitled in some editions ‘A Royal Allegory’ and thought to have been written partly by Frederick himself or at his suggestion, the History of Titi, a roman à clef of the British royal family, was a European cause scandaleuse. It came out late 1735 in Paris as Histoire du Prince Titi by Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, a writer who had lived for some years in London where he had had access to court circles – indeed, in 1736 he dedicated a work to Frederick in gratitude for having ‘received, from time to time, gifts and other signal marks of favour’ from the Prince. It was published almost immediately in Amsterdam and Brussels and then ‘Englished’ in two separate translations for publication in London in February 1736. One is

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sometimes attributed to James Ralph, although his biographer, John B. Shipley, rejects the attribution.34 The tale combines scandalous reflection on King George II (Ginguet) and Queen Caroline (Queen Tripasse) and Prince Triptillon (the Duke of Cumberland) with predictable satiric asides on the Prime Minister and perhaps less predictably on his ambassador brother, Horatio Walpole, endowed by the storyline with a foot-long nose. Standing alone in his royal virtue is the eldest son and presumptive heir Titi, a very paragon of good looks, affability, and love for the unworthy parents who treat him with vile fairy-talesque injustice and clearly favour the younger brother, modelled on the Duke of Cumberland, ‘greedy, and sordidly covetous from his very Cradle’.35 The History of Titi gives a great deal of attention to finances, which befits an allegorized story of a Prince of Wales kept perpetually short of money. (In 1737 the question of the princely allowance from the Civil List would flare up into a major parliamentary dispute when it was proposed that the prince’s allowance be doubled from £50,000 to £100,000.) It includes as well a frothy fairy-tale romance plot that turns on an amiable prince and charming fourteen-year-old commoner, Bibi. With the assistance of the good fairy Diamante these lovers are able to assume whatever animal shapes they wish. In the theme of metamorphosis the tale bears superficial resemblance to Eovaai, but the feeling and effect are quite different. The lovers of Titi are able to control their shapes by merely wishing it so and their love is sweet, apolitical, and quite self-consciously non-sexual. (During springtime they decline to assume the forms of birds lest they find themselves irresistibly inclined toward mating behaviour.) The ‘romance’ in Eovaai is better described as a series of thwarted assaults on the part of a wicked magician, at least until Adelhu re-enters the text at the end. But the political resolution is the same in both. The people rally around an unjustly treated prince and welcome him to the throne, which in Titi is vacated by the king following an uprising by the people outraged by the injustice of his treatment of his son: his ‘rapacious Avarice had made him so contemptible, and his extreme Oppression and Injustice so odious in his People’s eyes’. Eventually Titi and Bibi are conducted back to the capital ‘amidst the universal Shouts and Acclamations of a joyful People’.36 Two mock fairy tales, both supporting in their very different ways an image of an amiable prince badly used by his royal family who now waits in the wings to be ushered into power upon waves of thunderous popular applause.

A Mirror for a Princess The timing and affinities with History of Titi give reason to suspect that Eovaai was part of a loosely coordinated effort to mythologize Frederick, and we can speculate that Haywood was associated, possibly at some remove, with the ‘cubs’ and ‘Boy Patriots’ who met at Stowe. But whatever her connections with these

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young oppositional politicians, it seems entirely characteristic of Haywood that even when engaged in myth-making around a royal male figure she would remain keenly interested in the role of women within the nation’s political life, so much so that her ‘imaginative variant on the “advice to princes” genre’ would become advice to a female prince.37 Eovaai bears interesting relation to Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King which was begun two years after Haywood’s mirror for a princess was published. Bolingbroke’s treatise is thought to have originated in a request from Lyttelton to Pope that the latter would offer counsel and advice to a young and still somewhat unsteady Prince Frederick to prepare him for his royal role, and in particular to educate him in Patriot notions of service to the country. Pope appears to have passed on the assignment to Bolingbroke who was staying at Twickenham as Pope’s houseguest in the autumn of 1738. The resulting Idea of a Patriot King, intended to educate Frederick in his duties to the public, was addressed as a letter to Lyttleton, who was then in the Prince’s service.38 According to the work’s recent editor, study of the limited edition edited and privately printed by Pope (‘Pope’s edition’) suggests that it was understood to be ‘an advice-book in the Machiavellian mode’, modelled on The Prince, and was intended ‘very precisely for the circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales’.39 Haywood regenders the tradition and puts it to ironic use. In the opening pages the Princess Eovaai receives instruction in Patriot rule from her father, the wise and benevolent king of Ijaveo. He instructs her as a ruler in love for her country while at the same time cultivating in her, as a woman, ‘Virtues of the Mind’ rather than ‘any Endowment of the Body’. This utopian kingdom, it is important to note, has little use for femininity or the female body, a defect that Haywood will correct in the regenerated Ijaveo imagined at the end. In good Patriot fashion he warns against the ‘false Lustre of Arbitrary Power’ and, sounding very like Bolingbroke, insists that monarchs are bound by laws no less than their subjects, and that they find their glory in the liberty of the people.40 He disallows instruction in the arts of pleasing – singing, dancing, and musical instruments – and forbids praise of her beauty. A sly footnote informing the reader that her name means ‘The Delight of Eyes’ is the first of a number of ironies that emerge when femininity and statecraft come into contact.41 The political education Eovaai receives in the corrupted kingdom of Hypotofa upends the virtuous precepts taught by her father. He had warned against the allure of arbitrary power; her Hypotofan teacher, Ochihatou – the Walpole figure, at once wicked counsellor and sexual predator – uses flattery, false arguments and a ‘torrent of Libertinism’ to overwhelm her reason and awaken what the narrative represents as an innate desire for power: ‘Bound by no Laws, subjected by no Fears, we give a Loose to all the gay Delights of Sense; and, if like the wandering Stars, our Motions seem a little irregular to those beneath, the Wonder we occasion but serves to add to our Contentment’.42 Appropriat-

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ing the conventions of early modern pornography, Haywood further inverts the ‘mirror-for-princes’ genre by subjecting the princess to the regimens of corruption that feature in such pornographic classics as Edmund Curll’s Venus in the Cloister (1724). Ochihatou turns her over to a pair of female attendants, ‘CourtBauds’ as a footnote has it, who use ‘the most gross Flattery of her Beauty’ to excite her capacity for self-love. They lay her on a canopied bed over which a looking-glass has been mounted – thus is the ‘mirror’ trope literalized – and invite her to behold her ‘own heavenly Person’. As she awakens to an awareness of her pleasure-giving and pleasure-seeking body she sinks into a symbolically significant ‘Supineness’.43 In Patriot discourse the word supine is associated with the moral and spiritual condition of lethargy or somnolence that accompanies the spread of corruption – one need think only of the ‘Great-Yawn’ of Mother Dulness in The Dunciad. Earlier in the narrative Oeros (George II) under the influence of Ochihatou (Walpole) succumbed to just such a politically suggestive lethargy when ‘Infatuation seized his sacred Mind: all his nobler Faculties were perverted, his Reason was lull’d into a Lethargy’.44 The conflation of lethargy and corruption looks back to The Craftsman and before it Haywood’s own Memoirs of a Certain Island, and the imaginative use to which she puts indolence in Eovaai anticipates the morally enervating appeal of lethargy in the Spenserian poem from the late 1740s that Haywood would much admire, James Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, which in Epistles for the Ladies she reads as a Bolingbrokean allegory.45 Eovaai is lull’d into a dangerous unwariness by the craft of Ochihatou which ‘debilitated her Reason, and lull’d asleep all Principles of Virtue in her Mind’.46 She is at once a woman discovering her capacity for sensuous pleasure and a figure for a debilitated, luxury-addicted populace dulled to somnolence by ministerial enchantment. Ochihatou now takes over her education. Inverting the conventions of the ‘advice’ genre yet again, he offers the downright bad counsel that she regard herself as above the law and unaccountable to the people. Softened by her induction into self-regarding pleasure, she abandons her virtuous political principles with a rapidity that conveys Haywood’s distrust of precept. The virtuous teachings of her father are swept away ‘in an instant’ by the hugely greater force of experience. She ceases all efforts to subdue the passions and embraces the ‘pernicious Doctrine’ of wilful arbitrary power. For Haywood, here and elsewhere in the oeuvre, reason and precept are flimsy vessels; gross flattery and bad counsel will prevail. Neither habits of virtue nor the ‘natural Modesty of her Sex’ have ‘power to stem the Torrent of Libertinism, that now o’er-whelm’d her Soul’.47 Eovaai’s ‘soul’, to use Haywood’s language, has become what today we would call following Pocock’s analysis in The Machiavellian Moment a modern privatized self – restless, self-seeking, appetitedriven, atomized, and unrestrained – and as a princess-in-training she is happy to contemplate the exercise of her newly awakened ‘Lust of arbitrary Sway’.48

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The next phase of her seduction occurs at a court orgy when the men and women entertain themselves with ‘a Variety of humourous Postures and lascivious Jests’, forming a ‘kind of antick Dance’ of orgiastic ‘loose Desires’ from which all shame and modesty are banished. They ‘exchanged such Kisses, as the chaste Reader can have no Idea of ’. (The presence of children at this scene is doubtless intended to heighten the reader’s sense of its perversity.) Eovaai is sexually aroused. Having ‘now lost all that could be a Curb to Nature, [she] scrupled not to do as she beheld others of her Sex’. She is taken by Ochihotou to the classic amatory garden, a ‘thick Grove, where all the different Fragrancies of Nature seemed assembled’, and where there will be played out a coitus interruptus scene that features the usual treacherous robes, newly disclosed beauties, and faltering accents of consent.49 That the attempted seduction is politically implicative is reinforced by language that repeatedly sets up equivalences between sexual and political corruption. As Wilputte points out, the ‘Policy of his Love’ by which Ochihatou operates recalls Machiavelli’s use of the term to refer to a prince’s statecraft.50 He dare not pause lest she ‘return to her first Principles’, alluding to the ritorno ai prinicipii that is a key point in Machiavellian theory of corruption and regeneration and was cited by Bolingbroke in the first of the twenty-four essays comprising Remarks on the History of England. (These essays first appeared in The Craftsman in 1730 and 1731). Ochihatou hopes to wrest from her ‘a full Consent’, a phrase that reverberates in a range sexual and political contexts at this time.51 The ‘Torrent of Libertinism’ to which the princess is subjected by Ochihatou overcomes both her sexual restraint and her respect for the liberty of her people. In a double entendre that turns upon a key amatory term, his designs lead ‘to the almost total Ruin of both King and People’.52 The reciprocally political and sexual language insists that Eovaai is more than an embattled woman and Ochihatou more than the usual male sexual predator. He is at once predatory male and pernicious prime minister who fosters delusion, corrupts the judgment of his king, and perverts the relationship between ruler and ruled. The seduction of Eovaai operates at many layers of implication: the seduction of a woman, of a monarch, and an entire people – a country brought, or nearly brought, to ‘ruin’ by way of a false consciousness induced by corruptive ministers and at the highest level, by Walpole. Eovaai continues the analysis of power-seeking that Haywood began in the seduction fictions of the twenties. The codes and conventions, themes and affects she developed to explore the intoxicating nature of the love of power in sexual relationships provided her with a language readily adaptable to the depiction of the operations of power on a broader social and political scale in her later works. The Hypotofa sections show how a prime minister possessing ‘absolute Power’ uses luxury and libertinism to corrupt and delude. Hypotofa is a place where nothing is as it appears: a ‘seat of Bliss’ is in truth an ‘inhospitable Wild’; a minister who seems ‘one of the most lovely’ of men is really one of the ‘most misshapen of Mankind’.53 England/Hypotofa is in every way a perversion of the

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ancient morally ordered world. Private appetites and inclinations, self-interest and greed express themselves in a variety of sexual perversities: sexual assault, voyeurism, orgies involving children and even sex across species. It is a world where individuals give themselves over to innovation, restless curiosity and perpetual shifts of fashion, where even the king is driven to such shifts: possessed of ‘a little Vanity in Dress’ Oeros is addicted to the ‘new Fashions’ that his crafty minister is ‘continually inventing’ for him.54 The parallel universe of Hypotofa thus holds up another kind of mirror, the distorting but truth-telling mirror of the political satirist. In what seems a fulfilment of Bolingbroke’s analysis, the Hypotofans, lacking virtuous leadership, yield to the moral corruption of ‘private Luxury’ and the once prosperous country sinks into ‘a shining Beggary, a painted Wretchedness’: These now unfruitful Lands, not many ages since, produced every Necessary for the support of Man; but Pride and Idleness having spread a general Corruption thro’ the Owners Hearts, each grew above his honest Labour, forsook his home, to wait at the Levees of the Great, and preferr’d Slavery, accompanied with Splendor, to the plain and simple Freedom of his Ancestor.55

The affinities with the Scriblerians are obvious, especially the Swift of Gulliver’s Travels and Pope of The Dunciad, both of whom shared her vision of England in decline and saw in Walpolean corruption a signifier of the dangerous tendencies of the new socio-economic order. Like Trenchard, Gordon, Pope, Swift and many followers of Bolingbroke, Haywood was struck by the fantasy-driven nature of modern life shorn of its ancient public virtues. In the republican tradition as described by Pocock, ‘false consciousness’ was considered an aspect of political corruption: ‘Men who live by fantasies are manipulated by other men who rule through them’.56 (Pocock quotes Cato’s letters to the effect that to participate in commerce is to ‘live in a world of magic and transformation; and the price to be paid is admission that we are governed by our fantasies and passions.’)57 Pocock does not include Haywood in his account of ‘Country’ critics of modernity and the fantasy-based nature of modern life, but he might have. Like Cato (Trenchard and Gordon), she composed ‘indictments of the world of corruption and unreality’ and wrote powerfully imagined works that seek to penetrate ‘the false consciousness of the speculative society’.58 Pocock’s omission of Haywood from his discussion may have been understandable at the time, but her insertion into the canon of ‘Country’ satirists is long overdue. Works such as Memoirs of a Certain Island and Eovaai belong in the canon of ‘Country’ political writing every bit as much as do the texts of Swift, Pope, Gordon, Trenchard, and others. Her texts present richly imagined, impressively multi-angled reflections on the sources of national ‘ruin’ under Walpole, traceable in Haywood’s analysis to the fantasy-driven conditions of modern life, especially the pursuit of self-interest as it fosters greed, egotism, narcissism, irrationality, false consciousness, and delusion – in her succinct phrase, ‘imaginary Felicity’.59

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Eve in the Garden and the Lady Monkey A piece of myth-making in the ‘mirror for a prince’ tradition and a satiric mirror held up to the corruption, delusion, and unreality of life in Walpolean England, Eovaai is also a remarkable story of female desire. Haywood’s comic and satiric appropriations of inherited literary materials, many lifted from her own amatory archive and some undeniably misogynistic, represent one of this tale’s more impressive features. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the artistry that went into crafting this story about what the period regarded as a peculiarly feminine form of desire – curiosity, or the desire to know; and it gives further evidence of its author’s wide-ranging intelligence and imaginative attention to the political and feminist implications of her materials.60 Haywood wrote quickly, of course, but a close reading of Eovaai suggests that even her hastily produced narratives represent the distillation of broad reading and much thought. Submerged in the heroine’s orientalised name is that of her biblical counterpart, Eve, and the adventures of this latter-day Eve amount to a retelling of the Genesis story of the Fall in which the loss of the jewel occupies the place of the eating of the apple. The Genesis parallels are many and, oddly, they have gone unremarked. Both Eves exhibit that mode of transgressive inquisitiveness so often linked in Enlightenment discourse with curious women and more generally with the new spirit of inquiry that Barbara Benedict and others have shown to have aroused anxiety and ambivalence in the eighteenth-century mind.61 The fall into knowledge has catastrophic consequences for both Eves. Eovaai’s disobedience to her father results in the eruption of a perfectly ordered society into rebellion, civil war, and death – a ‘common Calamity’ that involved ‘all Degrees of People, from the Cottage to the Throne’.62 The scene takes place in a garden where Eovaai ruminates on ‘the last Words of her Father’, who had warned her to preserve at all costs the jewel, that ‘sacred Treasure’, upon which her ‘eternal Fame, and the Happiness of all the Millions you are born to rule, depend’.63 The jewel/virginity link features in a range of tales – Oriental, fairy, and moral – and no doubt a sexual implication is intended, but in more immediate and specific ways the loss of the jewel is associated with Eovaai’s desire for forbidden knowledge. Yearning to puzzle out the meaning of the words engraved on the stone’s bottom, she resolves in proper feminine fashion to ask the learned men of the kingdom for their counsel, but then, in a moment interpretable as either lamentable disobedience or thrilling defiance of the proprieties, she opts to rely instead upon ‘her own Ingenuity’.64 At just this moment of intellectual self-assertion the jewel falls from its casement and is snatched by a bird in a sky-borne display of the perils of female curiosity. Haywood seldom commented on her own works, but years later in Book 7 of Epistles for the Ladies (1750), speaking through one of her textual stand-ins, Astrea, she interprets Eovaai’s calamity-making curios-

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ity as signifying a desire to ‘enquire too deeply into the Mysteries of Religion’ and cites with approval Dryden’s comment in Religio Laici on ‘the Imbecility of Human Reason’ in religious matters.65 Without entirely discounting Haywood’s own words, one wants to object that the woman who wrote Eovaai and shared in full measure the Enlightenment faith in education, who advocated in The Female Spectator and elsewhere for expanded opportunities for learning for women, would surely have applauded the spirit of inquiry exhibited by the heroine, cultural anxieties about where such curiosity might lead notwithstanding. But to return to Haywood in 1736, the conflict between restraint and desire that preoccupies her throughout Eovaai is played out with especially disturbing effect in the scenes involving Atamadoul, the ‘lady monkey’. These edgy, quasi-pornographic scenes complicate the image of a sexually ‘fabulous’ Haywood, celebrated by many as champion of an emancipatory female libertinism, and they remind us that heterosexual desire in Haywood’s work, certainly in the earlier scandal chronicles but often in the amatory tales as well, is often allied with things dark, criminal, and dangerous – and in this instance, misogynistic. Atamadoul is portrayed as an aging coquette. A former woman of the royal bedchamber, she is sexually obsessed with Ochihatou and very nearly his match in craft, dissimulation, and sexual appetite, but she is made to pay dearly for her desires by being turned into a monkey and chained to the wall of a chamber where she must watch him having sex with other women. This brutal iteration of the classical trope of reason’s enslavement to passion is as savage a treatment of the reason/passion theme as anything found in the animal fables imagined by Swift. Atamadoul the monkey-woman is forever tethered to unsatisfiable sexual needs and forced to live wholly within her animal desires. She literally gnaws on her chain, symbol of her enslavement, and experiences unending agony: ‘wild Desires, Despair, and unavailing Rage, racks every Fibre in this wretched Frame, and makes me all o’er Agony!’66 She longs for consummation with Ochihatou but instead, in a grotesque parody of coitus, he spits on her. This must be one of the harshest treatments of the aging coquette on record, and if written by a man would probably be roundly condemned.67 But Haywood had few qualms evidently about deploying misogynistic stereotypes when it suited her satiric purposes, and was equally unsqueamish about using cross-species sex to make her points. In an episode that recalls both the abuse of Gulliver by a monkey in Book 2 of Gulliver’s Travels and his recognition of kinship with the Yahoos in Book 4, Atamadoul is sexually assaulted by a ‘very ugly and over-grown Baboon’. The language she uses to frame her story seems a deliberate echo of Gulliver’s: ‘taking me for one of his own Species’, the baboon ‘leaps upon me, caresses me after the way of those Animals, till my Strength is wearied out with struggling’.68 Atamadoul is eventually turned into a grey rat by Ochihatou, becoming thereby one of the ‘most hateful of all domestick Vermin’, a description that echoes the

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pronouncement of the Brobdingnagian king upon the English as ‘little odious vermin’ from Book 2.69 The monkey woman/rat disappears from the story, and the implication is that she gets what she deserves, the brutality of her passions having already reduced her to the level of a non-human animal. Her transformation into a monkey state commences with a loss of speech, the latter associated in Enlightenment thought with human rationality: ‘I found my Tongue deprived of all articular Sounds’, she reports; ‘my Skin was covered with Hair, my Limbs contracted, and, in fine, my whole Person transformed into a Monkey’.70 These transformations erase the difference between human and non-human, and sexual desire becomes the medium for what Manushag Powell, in a different context, has called a ‘kind of living contact zone between the species’.71 Readers of literature are accustomed to metaphors that equate humans with non-humans, but when the likeness is conceptualized in terms of sexual desire and projected by way of episodes of ‘ape-human miscegenation’ that are at once intimate and horrifying, the effect is as disturbing to many readers today as it was to Gulliver. The Atamadoul sections of Eovaai represent an important but unrecognized contribution to the history of the European encounter with ‘the Other’ in the eighteenth century and deserve to be read alongside Gulliver and the Yahoos.72 The story of the lady monkey is tied to the theme of curiosity, as well. Atamadoul’s substitution of herself for Eovaai as Ochihatou’s sex partner invites us to read her as Eovaai’s sexual double. She is the hyper-sexed active agent to Eovaai’s role as passive observer, the sexual avatar who acts out and receives full punishment for the desires that Eovaai experiences but never fully acts upon, thanks to the intervention of various supernatural forces. The language enforces the idea of narrative doubling. In her balked, chain-chewing desire for Ochihatou, the monkey lady is ‘all o’er Agony’.73 In the earlier scene in the garden, a sexually aroused Eovaai experiences feelings for Ochihatou that, in the narrator’s arch phrase, ‘might very well deserve the Name of painful’.74 Eovaai several times comes close to undergoing the monkey lady’s fate: she is nearly seduced in the garden, nearly raped in the chamber (by the deformed and brutish Ochihatou), and, tellingly, threatened with being turned into a weasel. While Ochihatou and Atamadoul ‘gratify the most riotous Luxury of Love’, Eovaai, initially an unwilling voyeur, experiences ‘a strange Flutter about her Heart’; the ‘Fierceness of their Bliss’ sent ‘unusual Thrillings’ shooting through ‘every Vein’. (‘Nature will be Nature still’ remarks the narrator laconically.) Curiosity causes Eovaai to pull out the magic spy-glass. She is greeted with a repulsive spectacle: the copulating couple is bathed in a ‘sulphurous Fire’ poured down by a pair of ‘frightful and misshapen Spectres’ while a thousand other forms ‘dreadful to sight’ crowd around and ‘with obscene and antick Postures animated their polluted Joys’.75 In the satiric world of fallen Hypotofa, sexuality is revealed in the true perspective afforded by the spy-glass to be ugly, repulsive, allied with the lust for power and

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as such entangled in corruption and fantasy. But the ritorno to political virtue in the marriage at the narrative’s close will also be a return to a redeemed sexuality.

Naked in the Forest The scene of Ochihatou’s assault on Eovaai in the forest following their flightby-air from Hypotofa is one of Haywood’s more effective remixes of her amatory materials. In a harsh parody of the trope of the lovers in the garden, she places the pair outdoors, stark naked, in a ‘lone and unfrequented Forest’.76 Readers of amatory fiction might reasonably expect the action to move toward rape or attempted rape, but what they get is something else again: a heroic, newly emboldened Eovaai who, despite the real danger of losing her human form forever, stands up to Ochihatou. In a springing leap of virtue, she breaks from his arms and snaps in two his ‘dreadful’ wand, the ‘Instrument of his Mischiefs’.77 In an instant his wicked powers are gone. It is a moment of deflation, satiric and penile, that makes the serious Patriot point that Ochihatou/Walpole’s power is bound up in the failure of the people to resist the ‘Will of the Enchanter’ – a failure of republican civic engagement, one might say.78 (Alhahuza, in one of the many echoes of Bolingbroke, had earlier declared the people of Hypotofa a degenerate race: ‘their very Souls are debilitated with their Bodies; all Ardor for Glory, all generous Emulation, all Love of Liberty, every noble Passion is extinguish’d with their Industry’.)79 But it is a comic moment as well. In a sweet gender reversal, one of many knowing nods at the amatory tradition, he ‘saw himself undone, before he had the least Thought of being so’.80 The impotence joke is continued in a mocking footnote in which the Commentator notes that ‘Ijaveo must be a very warm Climate, or Ochihatou of an uncommon Constitution, to retain the Fury of his amorous Desires, considering the Position he was in’.81 The mockery is well controlled and Haywood is making the most of this opportunity to evoke the precariousness of the male effort to ‘retain the Fury’ of sexual desire. Many critics have followed Jerry Beasley in regarding Walpole as conveyed by Ochihatou as a ‘figure of almost mythic proportions – power-mad, violently anarchic, a hero-villain indeed’, but it is important to note that in this scene the erstwhile evil mage stands revealed as amusingly fallible – one wants to say ‘phallible’ – his powers extinguished in a moment of obscene mirth.82 Satire of this sort has an obvious feminist application in making ‘male authority less awe-inspiring, less terrifying, and prepares women to challenge it’, as Staves has written in another context, and it is just another example of the way Haywood skilfully interweaves political commentary and feminist satire.83 But the comedy of erectile dysfunction soon turns dark.84 Eovaai had been forced to undress in order to be magically transported as a pigeon back to her own kingdom. When returned to human form she is naked and almost literally

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in his clutches (he had transported her in his talons), and although Ochihatou is stripped of his magic powers, he retains enough ordinary male brutality to set upon a course of systematic torture. (Interestingly, he has lost interest in rape.) After hanging her by her ‘delicate Hair’ to the bough of a tree, he gathers bundles of stinging nettles and thorny branches to ‘scourge and tear her tender Flesh’.85 Considered as an image of naked majesty – a princess divested of every vestige of royal authority, stripped indeed of feminine modesty and human dignity and hung from the bough of a tree – the scene is shocking, even repulsive. At this point the proxy for the Prince of Wales, Adelhu, arrives on the scene and appropriately he is ‘richly habited’, a figure of ‘most majestic Form’. After binding Ochihatou to a huge oak, he untwists Eovaai’s hair and, in an extension of the clothing-of-majesty motif covers her body with ‘an azure-colour’d Robe embroider’d with Silver Stars’. The associations of the political elements at play in the scene reflect a Bolingbrokean marriage of Tory monarchical ideals and Whig scepticism about the supposed majesty of kings. The oak tree to which Ochihatou is bound (and upon whose trunk he will dash out his brains) has Tory and even Jacobite implications, for the royal oak was associated with the Stuart cause from the middle of the seventeenth century. Early in the narrative Eovaai seeks shelter under a presumably royalist oak during an apocalyptic storm depicted as a kind of elemental civil war, during which ‘each contending Element was broken loose, and had free Liberty, by turns, to o’erwhelm each other’.86 The presence of an oak tree would seem to point toward Tory veneration for the majesty of monarchy, but complicating that interpretation is the spectacle, at once piteous and comical, of a naked Eovaai. Her nakedness would have had a political dimension for Haywood’s first readers. Bolingbroke used an image of naked majesty to distinguish his position on kingship from that of an extreme Whig when he wrote in The Idea of a Patriot King, ‘nor do I strip them [kings] naked, as it were, and leave them at most a few tattered rags to clothe their majesty’.87 One of the footnoted Commentators in Eovaai is reported to have ridiculed veneration of ‘Kings merely as Kings’ as weak-minded, on the grounds that the robes of monarchy are ‘a kind of gaudy Shew, to attract and amuse the Vulgar; and the Person thus dress’d up no more, perhaps less, brave and honest than the meanest Gazer’.88 Eovaai’s nakedness also recalls the earlier mocking disparagement of monarchical government as an example of ‘the Folly of Human Grandeur’; the Ancient Republican had ridiculed the notion that anyone ‘invested with the Robes of Majesty, becomes immediately divine in his own Person’.89 Eovaai is literally divested in this scene of the ‘Robes of Majesty’, and is left engagingly but also discomfortingly human, a naked woman in the forest. Related to the robes of majesty theme is the royal plumage motif. Feathers are a traditional symbol of majesty, suggesting (in Bolingbroke’s phrase) ‘the gaudy

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plumage of the crown’, the great spectacle of monarchical power.90 But Haywood ironically inverts this traditional meaning to suggest instead monarchical folly and impotence and, in the process, delivers a sly assessment of the capacities of Frederick’s father, George II, represented in the text as Oeros, a doddering and ineffectual king who is ‘particularly fond of Feathers’. He fastens them on his chest, shoulders, the hilt of his dagger, even at times and most laughably on his sceptre.91 When Ochihatou attaches an infected feather to his crown, Oeros slides into the near-fatal lethargy that delivers him into the minister’s power. Stupefaction by feather: it is an odd, almost grotesque notion, and it surely colours the reader’s response to Eovaai’s piteous call for a modest array of pigeon feathers. The ironies released by these varying meanings of oak trees, feathers, and royal robes make for a discomforting mix. The hinted-at mystical conception of the divinity of kings would seem to be affirmed by the appearance (in at least two senses) of Prince Adelhu in the forest, but the scene is generically marked as a fairy tale and in the moment Eovaai herself is anything but majestic. Surely there is something laughable about a woman who ducks behind a tree calling for feathers. The narrative is shot through with mocking scepticism that monarchs can claim any dignity at all beyond their appurtenances, and the reader is left with strangely mingled images of kingship, governance, and self-governance. Consideration of Eovaai within its political moment and in relation to established political tropes brings new appreciation of Haywood’s control of symbol and metaphor. She makes skilful use of traditional emblems – the habits and plumage of majesty, for example – which she incorporates in a scene that is part political satire and part pornography, the literalized metaphor of the stripping of the lady of state. She makes deft use of the resources of amatory fiction, a genre she had made her own, and finds in the trope of seduction a supple vehicle for analyzing delusion and corruption in modern political life. As Toni Bowers has noted, ‘the plot of seduction and betrayal was, so to speak, a language that everyone understood’.92 Pocock has written that Bolingbroke’s followers in the 1730s turned Walpole ‘into a figure doubly symbolic, to them a monster of corruption but to us the first modern statesman to impress a modern intelligentsia with the belief that his policies and personality were undermining the moral structure of human society’.93 Haywood’s Walpole neatly captures that duality. He is a monster, yes; but more subtly, he is master of dissimulation and, despite his physical deformities, a sexually charismatic figure of almost irresistible appeal. A student of the passions, subtle and penetrating, he knows how to mobilize the egotism and self-interest that in Haywood’s analysis increasingly define the restless, passion-driven, privatized individual in the new world of which Walpole was signifier. Eovaai in this view is a sophisticated study in the seductive attractions of self-seeking. In Jonathan Wild, published years later, Fielding would do something similar. Fielding’s satiric novel is ‘not just an attack on the corruption

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of politicians’, David Nokes has written, but more ‘subtly it is an exposure of the deeply paradoxical nature of our responses to power.’94 Where Fielding relies on the conventions of the mock-epic, Haywood uses her own brand of mockery to examine the lure of the delusions and fantasies unleashed by new forms of power. Eovaai is a mock-amatory satiric indictment of the conditions of modern life that is at once original and complex, not least in its innovative recycling of its signature ‘Haywood’ themes.

Beyond Patriarchy Eovaai posed a challenge to eighteenth-century patriarchal political theory deeper and more far reaching than even sympathetically attuned feminist critics may have realised. In Haywood’s inventive rethinking of Bolingbroke’s paternalism, the ‘androgynised’ image of the conjugal couple is made to displace the patriarchal image of the monarch as father of his people. The Patriot couple as image of proper monarchical rule is introduced midway through the narrative in the symbolic statuary Haywood creates for the great hall at Alhahuza’s castle. Commanding the central space is a pair of enthroned ‘majestick Figures’, Queen Ibla and King Glaza, who jointly ruled Hypotofa in the country’s virtuous past. Ibla, a warrior queen who threw off ‘all the Delicacies of her Sex and Rank’ to appear at the head of an army when her country was under threat, recalls Elizabeth, a heroine of the Patriot opposition; Glaza, who distinguished himself by using his own revenue to organize a military response, is possibly based upon Edward the Black Prince (fourteenth century), the first notable Prince of Wales and founder of the Order of the Garter, famed for his generosity in battle.95 This Patriot couple is said to have been fierce in its defence of the country but merciful to its enemies in victory, demonstrating an exemplary ‘Hospitality, and a Readiness in forgiving Offences’. More important than the historical identities of these ‘generous Princes’ – they may after all be amalgams – are the virtues they are said to exemplify: hospitality, a readiness to forgive and bravery.96 These are not the usual Patriot virtues and they point to the Jacobite romance dimension of the text that is another aspect of Haywood’s highly original feminism. Jacobite romance enters Eovaai by way of the story of Yximilla and Yamatalallabec, who emerge as almost text-book exemplars of doomed Jacobite lovers. This tale of rape and coerced marriage uses Jacobite themes to project dynastic politics in the Hanoverian period from a point of view sympathetic to the Stuarts, but realistic about the failure of their adherents to win the popular support required for rule. The heroically constant Princess Yximilla, instantly recognizable as a Jacobite heroine, loves and is loved by brave Prince Yamatalallabec. But their love is thwarted by a law – one that exists nowhere outside Haywood’s fiction – that prevents heirs to the crown from marrying without ‘the Consent of the People’.97

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(Critics who identify Haywood as a Jacobite fail to take into account her irreducible Whiggishness on the issue of consent: it is sine qua non of rule.) The failure of popular consent seems to stand allegorically for the resistance of the people of England to Stuart rule. Yximilla is eventually sexually assaulted and forced to marry her rapist. Her beloved Prince Yamatalallabec, a pragmatist, counsels resignation and seeks to ‘persuade her to that due Resignation that Gods require from all their Creatures’ and to recognize that ‘it was in vain to struggle with superior Powers’. He urges her to try to love her rapist husband.98 Yximilla and Yamatalallabec are reintroduced at the narrative’s close where the story of their constant but doomed love serves as a counter-image to the triumphal marriage of Eovaai and Adelhu. The contrasts are strongly marked and together constitute an allegorized tale of two dynasties: the Stuart side in decline, a vanishing possibility; the Hanoverian side ascendant and robust, re-energized by the recent marriage of Frederick and Augusta. Some will read in the triumph of wicked power over constancy, valour, and love in the story of Yximilla and Yamatalallabec an instance of ‘lost cause’ Jacobitism and a lament for failures of loyalty and fidelity – the so-called Jacobite virtues – in a world dominated by self-interest. (Adelhu, hearing their story at the end, concludes that even ‘the most binding Obligations’ to princes no longer seem certain.)99 But it would be a mistake to conclude that the story endorses the values or tendencies of that ‘cosmic’ strain of Jacobitism that counselled faith in the ultimate triumph of the higher good.100 Alongside the sentimentality of the ‘lost cause’ is a tough pragmatism that says it is time to move on. Just as Yamatalallabec counsels resignation, Haywood seems to be suggesting that the Hanoverian Prince, Frederick, represents the best hope for a renovated monarchy. Read as a whole, its pockets of regret notwithstanding, the narrative argues for a transference of allegiance from one prince of Wales to another. There are ambiguities and emotional complexities, to be sure, but to the extent that Eovaai advocates an actual dynastic agenda or ‘cause’, it calls for a Hanoverian future centring upon that prince of great expectations, the people’s prince, Frederick, whose recent marriage to Augusta is thus imagined as destined to bring ‘Fame, Honour, Glory, Peace’ to the country and – the final phrase is a characteristically Haywoodian touch – ‘Everlasting Bliss’.101 The conclusion of Eovaai can justly be said to advocate the ‘constitutional monarchy it presents in its very first pages’, but only with the proviso that the image of rule it affirms has undergone important modification.102 The narrative begins with a seeming endorsement of Bolingbrokean paternalism. The prelapsarian kingdom of Ijaveo is ruled by a strong fatherly monarch – the king’s name means ‘Father of the People’ – who instructs Eovaai in accordance with paternalistic principles of ruling for the good of one’s subjects.103 Eovaai herself endorses this view of kingship in her defence of monarchy to the ancient Republican of Oozoff when she defines a king as ‘indeed the Head of a large Family; for whose

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Happiness he is perpetually contriving’.104 Along the way the narrative exposes the failures of paternal rule: Eovaai’s wise and benevolent father, the well-meaning but mentally disabled father-king Oeros, the usurping Ochihatou; even the Patriot Alhahuza falls short in that his ‘harangue’ fails to rouse the aggrieved people of Hypotofa to throw off the false minister. At some point each of the available paternal models proves insufficient, and the ideal of the benevolent ‘Father of the People’ gives way to the conjugal couple. Adelhu and Eovaai are united at the close like the stone and its carcanet, a union of male and female, and together they replace feather-headed Oeros, inadequate father to his son and his people, and supply a happy alternative to the ideal of paternal rule. Their kingdoms united and the jewel restored to its case, they become ‘the most powerful, most opulent, and most happy Monarchies in the World’. The idealized union of male and female, foreshadowed in the Glaza and Ibla statuary and tragically defeated in the shadow case of Yximilla and Yamatalallabec, represents a union in which conflicting elements are held in balance – a blend (à la Glaza and Ibla) of strength and generosity, military power and well-tempered justice. We are left, in other words, with an ‘androgynized’ rather than a masculine image of monarchy, something for which there is nothing in Bolingbroke or the other Patriot writers to prepare us. It is a vision of good governance that represents the ultimately desirable form of a ‘mixed’ or ‘balanced’ constitutional monarchy. Eovaai is a politically heterogeneous work that combines royalist and even Jacobite ‘majesty of kings’ elements with an Old Whig emphasis on constitutional limitation, the voice of ‘the people’ and the ideal of consent, and includes as well a contractualist endorsement of the ‘natural liberty of the sons’ over the ‘political right of fathers’. Carole Pateman argues that the victory of the contract theorists was ‘an essential part of the transformation of the traditional order and the world of father-kings into capitalist society, liberal representative government and the modern family’.105 But what sets Eovaai apart and reveals Haywood to be a more original thinker than has been recognized is precisely her feminist reworking of monarchical paternalism. I am hardly the first to suggest that Haywood is first and foremost a pragmatist, a cynical one at times, acutely aware that female persons must find ways to live with and within a social order organized around the subordination of women and short on options for women of spirit and intelligence. Her fictions have been described, I think rightly, as tales of survival and hence accommodation. But on the level of political theory she resists accommodation, and in the storyline of Eovaai produces a blueprint for a more satisfyingly reciprocal model of male-female relations. Carole Patemen writes that in patriarchal theory all ‘titles to rule devolved from the original divine grant of kingly right to Adam, the first father’.106 But Haywood creates a never-never land of a ‘pre-Adamitical’ past and tells the story of a new Adam who together with a new Eve establishes a new form of rule. Some readers have found it troubling that Eovaai seems to

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surrender political authority when she grants him the kingdom of Ijaveo. But it should be noted that the language used to define their union, symbolized and ratified by the exact fit of jewel and casement, rejoices in the intensities of shared and perfectly balanced heterosexual passion: he saw they not only were exactly fitted to each other, but also that moment they [the jewel and its casement] were join’d, the Cement closed upon the Jewel, as it never had been loosened. What Words, what Ideas can be equal to the mutual Transports of this happy Pair! Eovaai!—Adelhu! – Queen of Ijaveo! – Prince of Hypotofa! – Divinest Woman! – Charming Hero!

Importantly, Eovaai’s passion for knowledge is carried over into the final pages and endorsed by Adelhu: he gives ‘Truce to Extasy’ in order to satisfy her ‘Curiosity’.107 The emphasis upon conjugal mutuality in the final paragraphs puts conceptual distance between their union and traditional notions of female subjection and suggests that Eovaai’s decision to transfer her kingdom to her husband should not be read as a recapitulation of the patriarchal story of Adam’s dominion over Eve. Haywood’s artificial but satisfying conclusion envisions a re-gendered political order in which a sexually fulfilled Adam and Eve rule together, their ‘Scepters’ ‘united’ in power, wealth, and happiness. A huge body of feminist scholarship has shown, and again I draw upon Pateman, that ‘from ancient times, political life has been conceptualized in opposition to the mundane world of necessity, the body, the sexual passions and birth; in short, in opposition to women and the disorders and creativity they symbolize’.108 Eovaai moves beyond these long-standing oppositions. It imagines in compelling detail an order in which a woman can enter into the political life in a way that does not deny the world of corporeal necessity, but rather affirms the body and the sexual passions even as it endorses the female life of the mind.

5 AT THE SIGN OF FAME: 1741–4

In the 1740s Haywood began to bend her talents ‘in a political way’ in a number of substantial works, two of which, The Female Spectator (1744–6) and Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), take the deliberately misleading form of ‘polite’ offerings to the ladies. Between December 1741 and April 1744 she operated a pamphlet shop at the Sign of Fame in the Piazza of Covent Garden where she sold a range of works including small-scale anti-ministerial items under her own imprint. The first half of her career had seen her shuttling back and forth between playhouse and publishing house, mending plays and writing some original ones of her own, performing on stage, producing translations and dashing off a variety of entertaining fictions. Except for the satiric fairy-tale romance Eovaai (1736), published in the off-season to build support for the Prince of Wales as a royal Patriot, there is little to prepare us for the oppositional journalism that looms large in the last fifteen or so years of her life. There is, to be sure, her work on stage at the Haymarket, but the mere fact of performing in satiric anti-Walpole revues at a time when it was the fashion to ridicule Walpole does little to clarify her political sentiments. But starting in the 1740s, she would write often and consistently as a Patriot in the opposition. The remaining chapters of this book tell that story. This chapter describes her publishing venture at the Sign of Fame and in the process begins to sketch the outlines of a largely untold story of behind-the-scenes involvement in mid-century oppositional journalism.1 Winter 1741–2 was a time of political crisis. The ministry had sustained losses in the general election in May and when Parliament opened in December, Walpole’s last as it turned out, the Commons was as closely balanced as any he had faced. Political passions were running high. On 2 February Walpole resigned office after nearly two decades as ‘prime minister’. His departure is often thought to have brought public interest in politics to a close but the reverse was actually true. The anti-Walpole campaign continued unabated in the months following, especially as it became clear that the inquiry into the conduct of his ministry was going nowhere and he would probably escape his ‘crimes’ unpunished.2 The spectacle of the powerful jockeying for place and position in the reconstituted ministry also attracted interest in the press. Politics in the immediate aftermath – 95 –

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of the Great Man’s plunge from power was every bit as absorbing and virulent as it had ever been, in other words, and according to the leading press historian for this decade, contemporaries would have felt that ‘at least between 1742 and 1744 the violence of the political comment expressed in the leading opposition papers surpassed anything that had been seen during the famous press wars of the Walpolian era’.3 It is against this background that we must understand Haywood’s entry into a new phase of her career as retailer and publisher of oppositional wares at Fame from December 1741 until early April 1744.

‘Eliza Haywood, Publisher’ We need a reliable account of Haywood’s activities as a publisher. The information collected by Spedding goes a long way towards supplying relevant details, but the account in the Bibliography is limited by omissions that reflect the difficulties of studying newspaper advertisements in the days before Burney Online transformed access to such items to a degree that still seems miraculous and, worse, it is riddled with errors in interpretation that result from faulty analysis of the evidence he was able to gather. The confusion in his coverage of her activities at Fame makes it hard to put together a reliable picture of the nature and scope of the professional life of ‘Eliza Haywood, Publisher’. The overview that follows adds some items to the publication list and removes a few that never belonged there, but Haywood’s career as a publisher remains an area that requires further investigation. Judging from newspaper advertisements, her earliest publications were sixpenny pamphlets of unmistakeable anti-Walpole tendency. The first was The Sublime Character of his Excellency Somebody, listed as a new publication in the December 1741 Gentleman’s Magazine and advertised in the Daily Post of 15 December, where it is ascribed to Sir Niky Uncommon-Sense and intended ‘For the Amusement of Everybody’. Also to ‘be had’ at Fame was a tract called Europe’s Catechism.4 Two months later the Daily Post, on 20 February 1742, announced The Right Honourable, Sir Robert Walpole (now Earl of Orford) Vindicated, a heavily ironic 24-page tract said to be ‘Printed for Eliza Haywood’. Its attack on Walpole was outspoken enough that the Daily Advertiser refused to run an advertisement, or such at least is the implication of Haywood’s sardonic retort: ‘Strange Alteration! a few Weeks ago, nothing against the late M[iniste]r could find a Place in this Paper, now nothing in his Vindication can be admitted’.5 April saw publication of a broadside, The Ghost of Eustace Budgel Esq. to the Man in Blue, advertised on 3 April in the London Evening Post. This elegant engraved broadside, inscribed to the Prince of Wales and available on royal paper, is discussed below. In the opening months of her stint as a publishing retailer at Fame she issued at least three short works in three different formats – a pamphletpoem, a tract, and a broadside – each strongly anti-Walpole.

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By March she was able to advertise the availability of ‘new books’ as well, having acquired stock in at least three substantial titles, The Virtuous Villager, Anti-Pamela, and The Busy-Body: or, Successful Spy. The information comes from an advertisement at the end of the first volume of The Virtuous Villager that names Anti-Pamela and The Busy-Body as ‘New Books, sold by Eliza Haywood, Publisher’, but it needs to be emphasized that, contra Spedding, the inclusion of the infamously confusing term ‘Publisher’ in this notice does not imply that she actually published these works, a point to which we shall shortly return. She did probably have a share in one of these however, The Virtuous Villager, a twovolume translation from the French, by dint of an arrangement with Francis Cogan, the soon-to-go bankrupt bookseller of dodgy repute with whom she had worked since at least 1730.6 She had translated The Virtuous Villager, probably on commission from Cogan, who then paid her with stock in the three works and possibly a part share in the copyright, at least that is my reading of the evidence. Haywood and Cogan had worked together to bring out the two previous ‘de Gomez’ translations, La Belle Assemblée (1724) and L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits (1734).7 The Virtuous Villager was advertised in The Champion, on 18 March 1742, as a translation ‘Printed for’ Haywood and ascribed to the author of La Belle Assemblée, that is Madame de Gomez, an identity used by Haywood in the twenties and thirties. In an analysis muddied by an inexplicable disregard for the period meaning of ‘publisher’, Spedding takes ‘Eliza Haywood, Publisher’ to mean that Haywood published these new books when the language makes it clear that she ‘sold’ them. I say inexplicable because elsewhere he cites Michael Treadwell’s authoritative article on the subject of trade publishers and is surely aware that copyright-holding booksellers should be distinguished from ‘what the eighteenth century called “a publisher”, or one who distributes books and pamphlets without having any other responsibility – he does not own the copyright or employ a printer, or even know the author’.8 A publisher, as the term would have been understood, was a distributor of printed matter, and there is no reason to think she meant to identify herself as a publisher in the modern sense. Had she wished to convey the information that she held the copyright, took the financial risk, got the work into print, and intended to come away with the profit she would have called herself ‘Eliza Haywood, Bookseller’ in accordance with contemporary usage. Haywood did do some publishing (in the modern sense), but in a small way, six-penny tracts, broadsides, and the like. With the single exception of The Virtuous Villager, to be considered next, she never published a substantial, book-length work. There is no justification for thinking that Anti-Pamela ‘was the first work that Haywood wrote with the intention of publishing by herself ’ nor are there grounds for accepting Spedding’s claim that she ‘published’ Anti-Pamela or The Busy-Body, both of which (as he knows) appeared under the imprints of other publishers.9

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The Virtuous Villager is a more complicated matter, however, for it does seem that in this particular instance Haywood was a publishing partner, albeit a minor one. The advertisement already noticed in The Champion identifies her as the work’s publisher, but is the only surviving advertisement to do so. Starting the next day and thereafter for the next three months, Cogan’s name appears in all advertisements, including the listing in Gentlemen’s Magazine. Based upon Cogan’s ‘dominance’ in the publicity and surviving copies, Spedding infers, plausibly, that he was ‘the major copyright holder’ and Haywood probably a ‘minor partner in the edition’.10 Haywood and Cogan may have agreed to share costs and profits or, what seems likelier, he may have given her a share in the copyright in exchange for the lengthy translation, or perhaps provided copies for sale at Fame in lieu of or in addition to either cash or a share. Such an arrangement would make sense from the perspective of someone trying to set up a retail trade, a possibility Spedding mentions.11 But he fails to register the significance of the fact that by this time Cogan was copyholder for both The Busy-Body and AntiPamela, which explains how these two ‘new books’ made their way to Fame and came to share advertising space with The Virtuous Villager.12 If Haywood published fewer books than Spedding ascribed to her, she advertised for sale more than are recorded in the Bibliography, and together the titles ‘to be had’ at Fame represent a fascinating range of offerings. A Remarkable Cause (1742) and Equity of Parnassus (1744) are imprinted as ‘sold by’ Haywood or ‘sold at’ Fame. Advertisements indicate that she also sold Europe’s Catechism (1741), Voyage to Lethe (1741), The Chinese Orphan (1741), and the topical but not especially political play, The Humours of Whist.13 Many of these works were, however, decidedly anti-ministerial, including two published by Charles Corbett: The Chinese Orphan, an unperformed Walpole-bashing play by Hatchett, and The Equity of Parnassus, a crude attack on Carteret and Pulteney.14 The cheerfully obscene travel narrative Voyage to Lethe is pornography purporting to come from the pen of one Capt. Samuel Cock – the name is fictive, the English Short Title Catalogue helpfully informs us – and it comes with a dedication to a long list of cocks, both male and female, including Misters Smallcock, Badcock and Nocock and, at the other end of the gender spectrum, Lady Hitchcock, Madam Handcock and Miss Shuttlecock. One presumes that Fame would have stocked Hatchett’s erotic poem, A Chinese Tale, published by J. Cooper. It inspired a ‘curious frontispiece’ featuring a woman masturbating, to which the running subtitle alludes in its reference to a woman with her leg on the table.15 It was advertised as sold separately for 2s 6d.16 The pornographic and political thrust of these wares is pretty much what one would expect at this time and in that place. More surprising is the high-toned nature of some of her offerings, a point well illustrated by the broadside The Ghost of Eustace Budgel.

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The Ghost of Eustace Budgel Esqr. to the Man in Blue, which can be seen in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, was advertised on 3 April 1742 in the oppositional London Evening Post with amusing Fieldingesque copy: it is ‘A Poetical, Propherical, Musical and Emblematical Print’ in ‘an entire new Taste, calculated to hit every Body’s’ and will ‘highly divert the Ladies at their Spinets, their Toylets or Tea-Tables’. It is inscribed to the Prince of Wales, who is handsomely represented in one of the plate’s engraved images. The ‘Man in Blue’ is Walpole himself, the phrase an allusion to a figure for Walpole (‘too trusted traitor!’) in the unperformed The Chinese Orphan, a product of Hatchett’s dramatic ambitions.17 It is hard to disagree with Spedding that Hatchett may have had a hand in Ghost of Eustace Budgell as well. The interplay of verse and visual image on the broadside sets up a familiar struggle between the forces of evil (Walpole) and the forces of good (the Patriot opposition), with heavy stress in the panel on the right upon Walpole’s crimes and on the left the suggestion of a ritorno under the presiding figure of Frederick. The latter, a handsome and appealing figure, the focal point of the panel in which he appears, is standing with four elegant gentlemen, and he points to a comically diminished representation of his father, George II, in somewhat wary embrace with Britannia. Above an image of the British lion is the caption, ‘Now I’m rousing’. The panel on the right features Budgell’s ghost, a green and putrid shade according to the text of the ballad, come back to tell Walpole that the day of reckoning is upon him: he will die on the scaffold and be spirited off to the ‘Infernal Shore’ by ‘horrid shoals of Fiends’. Even the dead hate him, the ghost adds. In the background is an execution scene in which Walpole’s surrogate is beheaded to universal joy: ‘a million mouths shout the universal approval’. Caesar’s (Frederick’s) ‘virtuous Choice’ falls upon the Patriots who will now steer the ‘almost shipwreckt State’ and the nation’s greatness will rise again. The broadside’s visual information expresses Patriot themes ranging from the pervasive moral corruptions of Walpole’s regime – in one of his five hands he holds a bag of gold labelled ‘I am lord Corruption’, the five hands being an obvious swipe at Walpolean financial chicanery – to its foreign policy failings, especially his inglorious pacific policy vis-à-vis Spain. The latter is evoked by references to Cartagena and the naval figures Admiral Edward Vernon, General Thomas Wentworth, Admiral Nicholas Haddock, and Admiral Hosier, who is falling off a horse and crying ‘I’m lost’. The verses sound familiar Patriot themes and, more unusually, reflect upon the ‘Evil’ that Walpole ‘hast done the Stage’. More remarkable still are the high production values. A ‘broadside’ is generally placed in the category of cheap print, a hastily produced piece of ephemera to be hawked on the streets. But inspection reveals this one be quite a classy item, a high-quality, handsomely executed etching with an engraved musical score that would have taken some time to produce.18 As the London Evening Post notice

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stressed, it could be purchased ‘on an Imperial Paper’. Its price of one shilling was very expensive for a broadside – a shilling would buy a play or pamphlet – and double that of an ordinary run-of-the-mill broadside, which could be had for six-pence. (For purposes of comparison, a cheaply produced ballad with a wood block illustration would cost just a penny.) The engraved musical score, this one set by Signor Plutone, ‘Composer to the Infernal Shades’ no less, is another unusual feature since a printed ballad would typically have ‘to the tune of ’. This is, in short, a ‘fine’ item and may speak to the genteel nature of the offerings ‘to be had’ in Haywood’s shop on the Piazza. There one could find print-matter designed to capitalize on the violently anti-Walpole mood of the moment, to be sure, as well as the pornographic items that were business as usual in London at mid-century, but it is worth stressing that these and other items seemed to have been pitched to a fairly high end of the market.

‘The Genuine Houshold Goods’ For additional information about the shop, including its closing date, we can turn to an advertisement that appeared with minor variations in the Daily Advertiser on 3, 4, and 12 April announcing the sale of ‘the genuine Houshold Goods of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, Publisher’. The notice confirms some details but unsettles others in the conjectural picture drawn by scholars of the shop of Fame, which has been variously imagined as a bookshop, pamphlet shop, or even kiosk or stall.19 It turns out that Fame was an upmarket shop, glass-fronted and fitted out with two cloth-covered counters, and it was advantageously positioned at a commercially desirable corner location that had a history of prosperous undertakings going back nearly a century. The Daily Advertiser notice also gives a rare glimpse of Haywood’s living circumstances during this two-year period and is thus worth quoting in full. To be Sold by HAND, This the three following Days, The genuine Houshold Goods of Mrs. eliza haywood, Publisher, at her House in the Great Piazza, next RusselStreet, Covent-Garden, viz. a four-post Bedstead, with very neat yellow Camblet Furniture lined with Sattin, a Couch Bedstead with crimson Harrateen Furniture, and several other standing Beds, Feather Beds, Blankets, Quilts, and Counterpanes; Chimney Glasses and Sconces; Chairs, Tables, Chest of Drawers, Card Tables, Pictures, an Eight-Day Clock, Stoves, a Kitchen Range, with useful Kitchen Furniture; two Compters cover’d with green Cloth, very useful for a Milliner. Note, The House to be lett, and enter’d upon immediately.

The notice gives us something we have for no other period of Haywood’s life, a precise address. We now know that from December 1741, or thereabouts, until April 1744 Haywood lived above the corner shop at an address that the slightly later numbering system would identify as No. 18–19 of the Great Piazza, on

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the north side of Russell St at the south-east corner of the Great Piazza. (At present it is occupied by a high-end women’s clothing store.) That this residence has remained unknown is due in part to the circumstance that Haywood never appeared in the books as a rate payer. The property was owned by the Duke of Bedford and leased from 30 April 1740 to one Samuel Beavor or Bever Esq. who from 1742–4 paid the rates on behalf of unnamed tenants. The annual rent was a fairly hefty £50.20 It is somewhat surprising that the notice announcing the sale of the genuine household goods managed to escape discovery, although the digitizing of the Burney collection certainly improves the chances that further discoveries of this ilk will surface more frequently. But for now the Fame years constitute the best documented period of her life as far as living circumstances go, and the picture that emerges encourages rethinking of entrenched notions of Haywood as a ‘solitary, bedraggled hack’.21 For starters, the household items are not what one expects to find in the possession of someone thought to be chronically beset with pecuniary distress. Commentators hostile and friendly alike assume that Haywood was ‘desperate for money’, that she moved through the literary ‘demimonde of struggling and disreputable professional writers’ ridiculed by Pope in The Dunciad, and that she stands today as a ‘pre-eminent representative of the “hack” writing for bread and looking for a niche market’.22 Grub street, indigence, disrepute, financial desperation: shuffle them as you will, these are the cards in the deck. Haywood has served many as the standard illustration of the Georgian writer-for-hire holed up in garret-lodgings boiling the pot with her rushed copy – or to update the terms a bit, subsisting through the production of repetitive, formulaic fictions. But the furnishings for sale evoke an existence considerably more comfortable and genteel than has been imagined. It was not unusual for tradespersons at this time to rent a ground-floor shop and take cheap lodgings nearby or on an upper floor, in a garret bedroom, for example. The ground-floor pamphlet-shop in St James’s that Laetitia Pilkington opened around the same time came with a parlour and kitchen behind, but she may have rented a room elsewhere for sleeping.23 So far as we can tell, however, Haywood occupied the entire house, and it was a substantial one: a four-storied residence with a kitchen below equipped with stoves, a range, and other ‘useful Kitchen Furniture’ and upper floors furnished with card tables, pictures, mirrors and sconces over the fireplaces, an ‘Eight-Day’ or grandfather clock, also known as a longcase clock, and a number of beds, some of them sounding rather sumptuous – like the curtained four-poster bed with satin-lined yellow curtains (‘very neat yellow Camblet Furniture lined with Sattin’) or couch bedstead with crimson harrateen curtains. (Camblet or camlet is a fine fabric composed of silk and camel or goat’s hair.) These were fairly expensive items and suggest that during this period she was commodiously circumstanced and able to support quite a considerable household that required a goodly num-

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ber of beds – including a four-poster, a crimson curtained couch bedstead, and an unspecified number of lesser beds, as well as mattresses, blankets, quilts, and counterpanes. All those beds … The questions are inevitable. Where did long-time companion William Hatchett fit into this ménage? Did he sleep solus in the crimson-curtained couch bedstead? Share the four-poster with Haywood? But speculation is unavailing. There is no evidence to place him definitively at the Covent Garden residence and in fact the autobiographical Remarkable Cause examined in a previous chapter would seem to have him living in Grub-Streetesque lodgings elsewhere. It is hard to imagine that Hatchett’s picture of bailiffs crowding the outer door of his lodgings where he took refuge, a veritable prisoner, could apply to the upmarket shop on the Great Piazza.24 Indeed, it is hard to find anything in the historical record to corroborate that they ‘lived upon terms of friendship’, not that this has stopped biographers from trying to weave a shared life for the couple. The notice in the Daily Advertiser further calls into question the identification of Haywood as Hatchett’s ‘mistress’. It is her name that appears in the advertisement, the residence is identified as ‘her House’ and, somewhat unusually, no agent is named, suggesting that she had conducted the sale herself rather than entrusting it to another, Hatchett for example. The term, conjuring as it does images of a woman in keeping who trades sex for a man’s financial protection, seems peculiarly illsuited to a relation in which the putative ‘mistress’ is the more visible and to all appearances more economically productive partner. Consistently the record shows Haywood to have been her own mistress.

Covent Garden But what was she doing with all those beds? Thoughts of participation in the sex trade also seem inevitable. As Norma Clarke asked, what else would she be doing in that neighbourhood?25 Covent Garden was a byword for prostitution; a redlight area famous for its bagnios, bawdy houses, taverns, coffee houses, theatres, streetwalkers, sexual irregularity and general disorder where, in the often-quoted words of magistrate Sir John Fielding, Henry’s brother, there are ‘Lewd women enough to fill a mighty colony’. It is an easy step to assuming that Haywood was involved in some way in the metropolitan sex industry, perhaps renting out rooms above to the trade as may have been done at the Cheshire Cheese, the tavern famous today for its Doctor Johnson associations.26 But other explanations are possible. Haywood may have had an extended household to provide for, starting with those two children mentioned in a letter from the late 1720s. Perhaps there was an aging mother, as well; sisters or brothers. Perhaps some of the well-heeled Shrewsbury Fowlers from the Grange had joined her in town for a spell. Perhaps she took in lodgers … The possibilities are many and to guesswork

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there is no end. Speculation in the Haywood story tends by its own scandalous momentum to arc toward the more sensational or ‘sexed up’ explanations and it is important to stay mindful that less exciting possibilities are equally plausible. So let us consider instead the implications of the Covent Garden setting. The area was much more than the haunt of prostitutes. The address where Haywood put out the Sign of Fame had been devoted to respectable commerce since the 1640s, when the elegantly arcaded Piazza was first developed. It had been an apothecary shop for much of its history. Its best-known proprietor was the Jacobite conspirator and apothecary to the family of the Duke of York, James St Amand, said to have been arrested several times on the premises; he died in 1728 with an annual income said to have been around £900. After Haywood’s stint there the address would become a coffee shop.27 The shop fronted a busy if often malodorous square, home to the city’s largest fruit and vegetable market. Within a stone’s throw, also on the Piazza, were John Rich’s Covent Garden theatre and Christopher Cock’s auction rooms. There were dining-and-drinking venues, including the highly successful Shakespeare’s Head Tavern that catered to theatregoers and, adjoining it, the Bedford Coffee House, famous as the resort of men of wit. Russell Street, a lively commercial thoroughfare connecting the east side of Covent Garden to Drury Lane, was the site of three famous coffee houses, Tom’s, Button’s and Will’s. The 1753 Survey of London has it a ‘great Thoroughfare’ ‘well inhabited by good Tradesmen’ – booksellers, a woollen draper, a watchmaker, to name only a few who advertised their wares in the papers.28 Most interesting from the political perspective is the shop where Richard Francklin printed The Craftsman, chief organ of the anti-Walpole opposition ever since it was founded in 1726. It was here that some of Bolingbroke’s most important political commentary was printed. The corner address would have seen a great deal of foot traffic, which may explain why Haywood did not advertise her wares heavily in the papers during the years she operated the shop at Fame. Once home to persons with titles and positions, by the early 1740s the Piazza ‘had ceased to be a fashionable place of residence’, the former aristocratic residents having relocated to the West End, according to Hugh Phillips, but the neighbourhood continued to attract artists and the demi-monde as residents. It became the centre of metropolitan night life: ‘Here were taverns, bagnios and houses of ill-fame, patronized alike by noblemen and persons of the lowest class throughout the night’. According to Phillips, the area above Russell Street where Haywood lived and worked was still respectable in an edgy, somewhat bohemian way, but the seedier area to the immediate south, below Russell Street, was another story. The Little Piazza, as it was known, was home to such notorious figures as the tavern-keeper Moll King, widow of Tom King, fined £200 in June 1739 for keeping a disorderly house, and the famous Betty Careless, thought to have been part of the inspiration for Betsy Thoughtless, who ran a disreputable

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bagnio until 1739.29 It was the Little Piazza just across the street that sported the high concentration of those brothels and bagnios that grab the attention in the usual accounts of the neighbourhood. With this ‘thickened’ description of the Covent Garden environs in mind, it is instructive to revisit two earlier accounts of the shop at Fame. In 1998, drawing upon research on women in the book trades, Catherine Ingrassia developed a picture shaped by feminist models of marginalisation. She imagined Haywood operating at a low level of the trade in print and assumed – as many did – that a woman lacking capital and influence within the tightly organized world of the book trade would inevitably be pushed out to the ‘peripheral, and certainly unprestigious, edges of the print trade’. She must have been a smallscale distributor or ‘mercury’ of some kind, but a step or two above the low-caste hawkers who sold ballads and such on the streets; possibly no more than a stallholder. (A subsequent account refers to the shop unequivocally as ‘a stall’ and has Haywood ‘likely hawking her own wares’, that is, crying them outdoors from a stall.)30 Ingrassia’s Fame is, in short, a feminist conceptual space that testifies to female exclusion; a sad, bleak, marginal space that literally puts Haywood out on the streets. Spedding, on the other hand, worked up a different set of secondary materials to imagine an earthy, robust, indeed Hogarthian interior space where Haywood would have been selling not just books but also paper, ink, notebooks, quack medicines and probably ‘risqué pamphlets, erotica and pornographic prints, as well as “cundums” and less effective contraceptives’.31 The story he wants to tell is pretty much spelled out by the title of his primary source: E. J. Burford’s Wits, Wenches, and Wantons: London’s Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century (1986). Spedding makes much of Covent Garden’s reputation as a red-light district teeming with pimps, prostitutes, and gambling dens and puts into play a set of picturesque ‘low-life’ ‘red-light’ elements: condoms, erotica, bawdy jest books, obscene ephemera, pornography, and a seedy clientele of rakes prowling the environs of Covent Garden figure prominently.32 There is something to be said for both accounts. Haywood did sell erotic materials and modern scholars can be grateful that she advertised them in the papers. We know from advertisements that she carried ‘Samuel Cock’s’ Voyage to Lethe, and it seems reasonable to assume that she would also have sold Hatchett’s erotic poem A Chinese Tale and their joint translation of Crébillon’s The Sopha. But many other kinds of works were ‘to be had’ at Fame, ranging from romances translated from the French to handsomely produced political engravings, from pamphlets and broadsides to multi-volume books, one of which, The Virtuous Villager, bore Haywood’s imprint. For her part, Ingrassia is right to stress that Fame did not rise to the level of ‘a full-scale bookselling shop’.33 But the fact that it was a pamphlet shop need not relegate Haywood to the lower levels of the trade. The ‘small book’, as Johnson defined the pamphlet, was indeed a lesser

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format, cheaper and smaller, and thus conveniently within the reach of a startup publisher with little capital. But print historians these days emphasize the cultural importance of the pamphlet format and no longer dismiss print and pamphlet sellers as obscure ‘rag-tag entrepreneurs’.34 They remind us that pamphlets, topical and often quite lively, were valued for their immediacy. They were the quickest way to reach a large number of readers, and pamphlet shops were the gathering place of choice during a time of political crisis when a ‘great noise’ of this or that was to be heard about the town. One London tradesman reported during the alarms of the Jacobite invasion in October 1745 that ‘the newspapers [are] every day full of pathetic incitements to fight for our king and our liberties; and the pamphlet shops crowded with entire new books on the same important subjects’.35 A pamphlet shop at the busy corner of Russell Street and the Great Piazza would surely have attracted literate and politically minded people of all sorts, from aristocrats to tradesmen and leisured women to apprentices, all inclined to browse a range of pamphlets on public topics of the day. Once the wenches-and-wantons approach to the Covent Garden setting is pushed to the side, a richer symbolic typography can be brought into play and used to frame new ways of imagining Haywood’s place within both urban space and the emerging urban literary culture. The Piazza and surrounding streets together formed one of the liveliest and certainly the most diversified public spaces in the metropolis. A singular mix of residences, commercial sites, and public spaces, the area included substantial townhouses, crowded subdivided buildings, shops, brothels, taverns, coffee houses and bagnios, as well as polite entertainment spaces – such as the auction rooms visited by Betsy Thoughtless. It was a hybrid space that straddled contradictions, mingling ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, polite and rude human elements. The great square itself, with its elegant Italianate arcade, defined the classical parameters while smack dab in the centre stood the open air fruit and vegetable market where rotting cabbages and the like left behind filth and nastiness. It is a fitting topography for commercially-minded women writers like Haywood – women urban, knowing, market-orientated, entrepreneurial, and prepared to fend for themselves; women such as Haywood, Charlotte Lenox, and Laetitia Pilkington, who wrote for pay, set up shops, sold prints and pamphlets, ghosted letters and petitions, tried their hand at periodicals and adapted to the niches opening up to them in the rapidly evolving literary ecosystem. Covent Garden seems a fitting locale for this new breed of independent, self-supporting women. Covent Garden was linked in the cultural imagination with prostitution but with many other aspects of female experience as well – with street smarts, night life, survival, use of one’s wits, knowledge of ways of the world – and associated in turn with that strain of the popular novel that enacts the psychosexual drama of a young woman’s passage into the adult world. Pamela, one of her earliest

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critics asserted, was not ‘artless and innocent’ but rather was possessed from the outset ‘with as much knowledge of the Arts of the Town, as if she had been born and bred in Covent Garden’.36 George Colman in 1760 had a character lament that a ‘man might as well turn his Daughter loose in Covent-garden, as trust the cultivation of her mind to a Circulating Library’.37 Covent Garden was a place of duality – of danger, but knowledge; of ruin, but growth – the very stuff of the eighteenth-century novel. Its link with the metropolitan sex industry might seem to embody a reference to the disrepute of women writers, but as the site of social hybridity it points toward emerging varieties of urban identity, to the potentially transgressive appeal of new kinds of knowledge and experience, to curiosity, modernity, and the novelistic theme of initiation. And thus it seems ‘symbolical’, as Aurora Leigh would say, that Haywood would set up shop at the highly permeable boundary between the respectable Great Piazza and the rowdy, disorderly, brothel-studded sector below Russell Street in the Little Piazza; that she would be positioned just there, on the respectable side of the division. Like her contemporary Defoe she was sympathetically attuned to new forms of representation in a rapidly changing literary environment. Both embraced (with misgivings) ‘curiosity’ in their fictions and both created compellingly ambivalent representations of the passion to know – a passion that sends H. F. out into the streets of plague-stricken London to experience for himself the horrors of mass death, that sends Fantomina back to the theatre to experience what it is like to converse with men with the freedom of a prostitute, that impels Eovaai, that latter-day Eve, to seek to read the writing hidden at the bottom of the stone and thereby bring catastrophe upon her kingdom, that sends Betsy Thoughtless out to explore Westminster Abbey on her own. A dangerous education: this is the fundamental quest of Haywood’s most interesting heroines. And Haywood herself maintained canons of literary and aesthetic decorum while pursuing very nearly impolite aims and, as her ‘symbolical’ topographical situation during the Sign of Fame years hints, operated within the precincts of polite culture, but just barely. An increasing number of recent studies have shown that Haywood was as edgy as they come.

The Sign of Fame The sign of Fame that hung outside her pamphlet shop is often assumed to represent an ironic self-reference to the infamy Haywood had achieved as a woman and as an author, thus projecting the image of the scandalous woman writer who deliberately courted ill-repute and flaunted all those womanly conventions calling for modest retirement. Fame thus captures for Haywood’s admirers some of the fascination exerted by her seeming ability to break free of the restraints that hedged the lives of other women. It is an appealing image, certainly, but

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incomplete and in some ways misleading. ‘Fame’ was a concept with complex meanings in the period, and ‘infamy’ was probably several removes from the usual habits of thought, which were still grounded in a cluster of classical and Renaissance understandings of fame. One was the notion of fame as related to ideals of artistic excellence and thus high literary purpose. Fame in this sense was closely linked with the humanist ideal of public praise as recognition of, and thus spur to, artistic aspiration. References to ‘Fame’ often served as shorthand for serious literary ambition and, increasingly in the age of the professionalization of the writer, could be used to mark the distance between high purpose and the supposedly sordid transactions of the literary marketplace. Aphra Behn announced, ‘I value Fame as much as if I had been born a Hero’; Henry Fielding as a young playwright ‘aspires to Fame, / And courts Applause without the Applauder’s Shame!’38 ‘Fame’ could stand for the kind of cultural capital created and promoted by writers of solid repute, a notion that undergirds Lyttelton’s appeal to Pope that he write in support of Frederick: ‘let the Prince hear every day from the Man of this Age, who is the greatest Dispenser of Fame’.39 Early in her career Haywood frankly avowed her craving for fame and was at pains in her prefaces and dedications to make it known that she was no mere hack. By the 1740s when she placed the sign of Fame outside her shop, this classically derived ideal was coming to seem musty and, in the context of an increasingly professionalized literary culture, perhaps a bit silly. Certainly her own career had moved in directions she might well have rejected back in the Hillarian days when she frankly proclaimed herself ambitious to write for literary glory. Another classical image of Fame still in play was the woman associated with the revelation of secrets, visually identifiable by the hundred tongues said to be represented on her clothing. This Fame was a gossip and scandal-monger or, more positively, the discloser of buried truths, and thus a perfect embodiment of the genre of secret history that Haywood in the 1720s had made something of a specialty. ‘Oh! may the horrid Truth be known to all!’, exclaims a male character in Memoirs of a Certain Island, ‘may the quick Ears of busy Fame catch from my Lips the Secret, and all her hundred Tongues speak nothing else but Incest, and Wyaria’.40 Hundred-tongued Fame is a splendid emblematic representation of Haywood the scandal chronicler determined to expose the lies, betrayals, and nasty secrets that lie buried, and bring the unknown guilty to justice. But this sense too looks backwards. Her best-known work in the scandal chronicle line was done in the early days of her career, and with shifts in the literary and political environment, her interests had moved on. In the 1740s she required a different version of Fame. A third classical image of Fame was available, the trumpet-bearing female figure who was associated with Renaissance humanist ideals of civic virtue and more recently with the Patriot opposition. To invoke this idea of Fame was to

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invoke notions of public-spiritedness and active citizenship and, within English oppositional discourses, to mobilize ‘Country’ ideals of active, virtuous and patriotic citizenship. (She could figure in ‘low’ representations as well: in period satire Fame’s trumpet was known to emit farts.) It is almost certainly this Patriot reincarnation of long-standing ideals of civic virtue that was uppermost in Haywood’s mind when she cast about for a visual image to represent the wares in her shop. How perfect to place in the hands of a woman the instrument with which to trumpet the political good news, some latest victory over a corrupt ministry perhaps. Herbert Atherton writes that graphic satire at mid-century drew upon a ‘corpus of traditional symbolism’ to re-enact over and over the confrontation of good and evil by way of a ‘time-honoured panoply of allegorical figures’. One of these was Fame, announcer of good news.41 In opposition satire, Fame’s trumpet was invested with specific political meanings: it told of the triumph of civic virtue over ministerial corruption, the victory of Patriotism over Walpole and his successors. Sometimes two trumpets were required. The caption in the satiric print To the Glory of the Rt Honble Sr Robert Walpole explains that ‘One Trumpet Suffices not to publish so much Glory’.42 With these well-established visual conventions in mind, we can begin to form an idea of what the sign outside Haywood’s shop probably looked like. If I am right, its likeness has been in plain sight all along, available for viewing on the dust cover of a recent collection of essays, Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator (2006), and instantly accessed via the Google images search engine. It can be seen in the elaborately framed image that occupies most of the upper third of the frontispiece to Female Spectator available early in 1745 for binding with the first collected volume of The Female Spectator and sold along with Book 9. It is in Book 9 that a personification of Fame will sound her ‘Golden-Trump’ to announce that the British spirit, active once again, will restore long vanished virtue to her ancient home.43 One must view this elaborately framed picture-within through the ‘period eye’, in the useful phrase of art historian Michael Baxandall, to catch its significance.44 Critics in our time have been captivated by the image of the four female editors grouped around the writing table, a portrait of the ‘little Assembly’ introduced in the opening number of Female Spectator, the supposed authors, and it is indeed a fascinating scene: an idealized image of female authorship, sociable, collaborative and intellectually engaged, that all but pulsates with that ‘extreme activity of mind’ that Virginia Woolf detected in women’s writing later in the century. The trumpet-bearing figure above them is easily overlooked. The only critic who has written in any detail about the frontispiece saw a ‘feminized mix of Gabriel and Mercury’, no more.45 But the viewer familiar with visual conventions of the period gazes on this same figure and realizes with a thrill that it surely reproduces the sign of Fame that hung outside the door of Haywood’s

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shop. The long-necked trumpet pointing outward perpetually proclaimed the victory of Patriot virtue over ministerial corruption at the same time that, less grandly, it invited passersby to check out the latest political pamphlets from the opposition side. The reader of A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood can view it within the volume’s frontispiece.

Fame is Shuttered The years from the turn of 1741–2 through to April 1744 when Haywood sold books and pamphlets at Fame coincided with a period of strenuous writing activity during which she began or completed some of her most popular and important projects, some quite substantial. New titles include The Sopha (translated with Hatchett, published anonymously in April 1742); the two-volume Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (February 1743); A Present for a Servant-Maid ( June 1743); The Fortunate Foundlings ( January 1744). The latter two were published by Thomas Gardner, with whom she would work closely for the rest of her career. The first number of The Female Spectator, in April 1744, another Gardner publication, appeared shortly after the shop was shuttered. Adding to an already impressive output is another title, never attributed to Haywood, The Lady’s Drawing Room (1743), which I suspect on internal evidence to be a Haywood production.46 It is testimony to her prodigious professional energies that she found time to operate a pamphlet shop and oversee a modest publishing venture while turning out so much vendible copy. Why she closed down the shop in April 1744 is not known, but the haste implied in the notice of the sale of the household goods leads one to suspect financial exigency. The sale was announced on 3 April and shortly thereafter a second notice indicated the house would be ready to be ‘enter’d upon’ by the middle of the month. Shop rents were often payable quarterly in advance. The timing of the sale suggests she may have been unable to make the 1 April payment. Financial exigency would also explain the sale of all those beds and other goods. However, it is equally possible that the move corresponded to a reduction in her household, the children (assuming they had survived) perhaps ready to head out on their own. The seeming haste may indicate something about her character, that she was the sort of person accustomed to disposing of her affairs in an impetuous manner. It is not known where she next took up residence or whether she continued in the retail trade but the fact that she self-identified as ‘Eliza Haywood, Publisher’ in the sale notices strongly implies her desire to keep that line of work open, and we know from testimony in the Goring examination at the end of the decade that she was spoken of within the trade as a publisher as late as December 1749, when Charles Corbett testified to having ‘sold several things Wrote & Published by the sd. Mrs. Haywood’.47 When it comes to personal circumstances, we must

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make do with shadows. We can be certain, however, that by mid-April the shop at Fame was closed and that she stood poised to enter into the most politically active period of her writing life. Three of her most accomplished pieces of political commentary would be written before the decade was over, beginning with one of her most respected achievements, The Female Spectator.

6 THE FEMALE SPECTATOR

Haywood must have begun working on The Female Spectator well before the shop at Fame was closed down. The monthly essay-paper began its two-year run in late April 1744, an odd time, one might have thought, to launch a periodical professing to offer ‘gay and inoffensive’ entertainment. Not only was the parliamentary session about to end, meaning that the ‘Town’ would soon empty for the summer, but the country was in a state of alarm over fears of French aggression. The Habeas Corpus Act had been suspended for three months from late February and would be suspended twice more. The Female Spectator was a success from the start, however.1 Its proprietors clearly regarded the venture as a major undertaking and were willing to spend quite a bit on publicity. It was announced to be ‘this day published’ in the Daily Post on 24 April following much fanfare and without the least hint of political intent: the offering will have an improving tendency, with many ‘amended, and All agreeably amused’. It combined the tried-and-true features of the essay-paper in the Spectator tradition with the more au courant features of the miscellaneous monthly magazine then coming into fashion.2 With its address to ‘the ladies’, a sure sign of genteel intentions, and ingratiating aim of pleasing ‘all of a polite Taste’, and with its movement through and across a range of social and urban locations, The Female Spectator contrived to position itself as carrying forward the ‘polite’ cultural agenda of an aspiring generation of women – and men, as will be seen – within an expanding urban culture.3 The Female Spectator is usually read in contrapuntal relation to the ‘lucubrations’ of Mr Spectator, her ‘learned Brother of ever precious Memory’, and praised for its vigorous challenge to the masculine authority of her celebrated predecessor.4 Few modern readers have thought to read The Female Spectator in relation to contemporary politics, and then only quite recently, and no one has thought to read it alongside oppositional pamphlets from the mid-forties. In this disregard for political intent, they are abetted by the Female Spectator herself who famously proclaimed herself possessed of an ‘Aversion’ for ‘meddling with Politics’ – and more than one good critic has taken her at her word.5 But Haywood would meddle with politics from now until the end of her career. The – 111 –

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Female Spectator is not overtly political in the allegorical way of The Adventures of Eovaai (1736) or in the commentary on ‘the times’ manner of her next periodical, The Parrot (1746). In The Female Spectator, entertaining stories of love, courtship, marriage, and family life alternate with long swathes of instructive social and moral commentary in a singular mix of edification and scandal that Robert Mayo described nearly half a century ago as a ‘bewitching blend of passion and propriety, fashion, and gossip’.6 But two of its twenty-four instalments, Books 8 and 9, are intensely topical. They register an enthusiastic response to the formation in December of the so-called ‘Broad-Bottom’ ministry and do so with an immediacy usually reserved for news sheets and pamphlets, while a third installment, Book 18, offers a sustained if oblique response to the silencing of the opposition press during the Jacobite invasion.7 It could once be said that the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Walpole in February 1742 brought ‘an abrupt end to the rich vein of satirical myth-making enjoyed by a receptive audience during his twenty years of office’, but recent work on the London press in the 1740s has shown that political argument and abuse continued to thrive.8 In a discussion of mock-biblical satires Michael Suarez observes that Walpole’s fall ‘did little to stem the tide of this popular and versatile satirical mode. Other targets were easily found, including the new Ministry and its Patriot placement.’9 Although the literary campaign against Carteret and the Hanoverians in 1743 and 1744 is overshadowed in literary studies by the earlier one against Walpole, the assault on the Carteret ministry was at least as violent: ‘No Opposition since the Revolution had exhibited a bolder effrontery in attacking the Throne.’10 In at least two of its monthly issues this gay and inoffensive periodical behaved as if it were a political pamphlet – it was advertised in the papers as ‘a fresh pamphlet monthly’ – and there are signs scattered throughout that Haywood had joined forces with, or was at least loosely allied with, the more vocal opponents of the Carteret ministry, including the personnel of the vigorously anti-ministerial weekly Old England, or the Constitutional Journal. This chapter considers for the first time Haywood’s role in the shadowy world of mid-century political journalism. Journalists occupied a low position in the trade, according to Michael Harris, and ‘remained uneasily poised between the dominant booksellers or politicians and the printers, working on the margins of the London press and seldom establishing an independent status within it.’11 They can be ‘the most elusive’ of the newspaper personnel and the ‘comprehensive anonymity that cloaked all forms of content’ at this time obscures the position ‘of even the most notable contributors’ to the papers.12 That Haywood was recognized by her colleagues as a contributor to the oppositional press seems probable, if difficult to prove, and despite her almost inevitable obscurity vis-à-vis this largely faceless sector of the profession, it is already evident from reading The Female Spectator (as well as The Parrot and Epistles for the Ladies) in

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relation to oppositional pamphlets and journalism in the 1740s that her involvement with the London political press deserves further investigation. For the rest of her life she would produce works that exhibit an informed and often satiric engagement with contemporary public life and that hint at connections with well-documented figures in London’s oppositional print circles. It is no exaggeration to say that her major political journalism from this decade, The Female Spectator, The Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies, constitutes a grossly underused source for study of the oppositional press at mid-century. These periodicals are remarkable as well for advancing a distinctive and at times almost utopian feminism that calls out for exploration.13

Anonymity, Allies and Collaboration Although often approached as if written in Haywood’s own voice, The Female Spectator is presented as the reflections of a periodical persona who is understood to be a gentlewoman of middling rank, considerable worldly experience and ambiguous womanly ‘estate’ – whether wife, widow, or single woman is deliberately left unstated. The hovering implication is that the Female Spectator has managed somehow to slip free of conventional womanly categories. The earliest notices in the papers imply that the ‘fresh Pamphlet monthly’ was the work of unnamed multiple authors and there is nothing in them to suggest Haywood’s involvement. In creating a persona, Haywood was following standard periodical practice. An eidolon, as it is sometimes called, enabled authors to treat their ‘alter egos with self-deprecatory humour, while still retaining their own dignity and credibility as social commentators, educators or moralists’, and in the case of the morally uplifting The Female Spectator papers, the need for disguise was strong.14 The Haywood name (or as we might say, brand identity) would have been a liability in a venture such as this. Although not quite the figure of notorious disrepute familiar in accounts today, she was not entirely respectable either. In the delicate locution of her early biographer, the ‘World seem’d inclinable’ to ‘affix on her the Character of a Lady of Gallantry’.15 Her name continued to be linked publically with her racy debut novel Love in Excess, London theatregoers may have remembered the flamboyant roles she played at the Haymarket in the thirties and her recent stint as a highly visible Covent Garden pamphlet seller with a line in ‘adult’ wares would have done little to burnish her credentials as instructor of youth and moral commentator.16 The only real option was to deploy an anonymity that was in any event quite customary in periodical ventures. There would be no official acknowledgement of her authorship until her death when her obituary revealed (or perhaps in some quarters, confirmed) that hers was the ‘great Hand’ in The Female Spectator.17 To this obituary we will return shortly.

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Spedding thinks Haywood was probably ‘soon known to be the author’ but was unable to find confirmation prior to a French work of 1751, Raynal’s Nouvelles Littéraires, and states that all additional references to her authorship occur after the 1756 obituary.18 But if I am right about the allusive Fame frontispiece discussed in the previous chapter, then the visual self-reference implanted in that representation of the ‘little Society’ of authors would have provided anyone familiar with the Covent Garden area with fairly sure evidence of her authorship starting January 1745, and a reference from late 1748 indicates she was known by then to be author. Memoirist and wit Laetitia Pilkington, no admirer of Haywood – she thought her to possess with Manley the ‘wicked art of painting up Vice in attractive Colours’ – refers to the periodical in language that suggests her authorship was already common knowledge: ‘Mrs Haywood seems to have dropped her former luscious Stile and, for variety, presents us with the insipid: Her Female Spectators are a Collection of trite Stories, delivered to us in stale and worn-out Phrases, bless’d Revolution!’19 And there were playful nudges in the text right from the start. Early in Book 1 the Female Spectator quotes without attribution lines on the nobility of the passion of love that had been inserted since 1722 in all editions of Love in Excess. Perhaps she was enjoying a private joke. Certainly it is hard today not to see a sardonic wink when the Female Spectator adds, sternly, ‘I can by no means approve of such Definitions of that Passion as we generally find in Romances, Novels, and Plays’.20 It seems safe to say that by at least 1746 her connection with the periodical would have been an open secret among the London cognoscenti. Leah Orr has recently questioned Haywood’s authorship of a number of items in the Bibliography, one of them The Female Spectator, in a forceful argument that demands reconsideration of issues of attribution that many thought had been settled by Spedding. There seems, however, little doubt that Haywood wrote The Female Spectator, although it is not so clear that she was the sole author. This is not to suggest that the framing fiction of a ‘little Society’ of female assistants is anything but an invention. The editorial team comprising Mira, Euphrosine and the widow of quality along with their ‘Mouth’, the Female Spectator herself, plainly represents a reimagining of the convention of the collective editorial persona traceable back through Mr Spectator’s ‘club’ to the 1690s at least, when John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury purported to be the product of an august ‘Athenian Society’ known now to have consisted of Dunton and two friends. Many of the letters purporting to come from actual correspondents, such as that from Curioso Politico discussed below, are doubtless fictions as well. But there are subtle indicators that Haywood’s was not the only hand that went toward the making of The Female Spectator. These indicators are scattered over many sources and years and, slight enough in themselves, form a suggestive pattern. For example, in newspaper notices ‘the

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Authors’ of The Female Spectator, and later Epistles for the Ladies, acknowledge the ‘great Helps’ they have received from ‘Persons whom they are not authoriz’d to name’.21 When Epistles for the Ladies began its monthly publication in midNovember 1748, ‘the Authors’ used newspaper notices to thank the ‘many worthy and ingenious Persons’ who have assured them of ‘their Assistance’ and gratefully acknowledge the ‘Helps we have already received’.22 An unknown contributor to Whitehall Evening Post, of 17 July 1750, implicitly identifies Haywood as ‘one of the Principal among you’ but nonetheless addresses the ‘Much-deserving Authors’ of The Female Spectator and Epistles.23 The strongest single piece of evidence comes from the obituary notice that appeared on 26 February 1756 in the Whitehall Evening Post. The writer, after paying tribute to ‘the celebrated Authoress of some of the best Moral and Entertaining Pieces that have been publish’d for these many Years’, provides a highly selective list of her publications that distinguishes those works in which she had a ‘great Hand’ – The Female Spectator and Epistles for the Ladies – from those for which she was author, a category that includes some of her best known late prose fictions, including The Fortunate Foundlings, The History of Betsy Thoughtless, The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy and The Invisible Spy – all of them Gardner publications, a circumstance whose importance will shortly emerge. That this information comes from the Whitehall Evening Post is significant. Spedding repeatedly calls the reliability of this obituary into question, although he does finally admit it as a witness, but research into the history and personnel of this paper, a tri-weekly launched in March 1746, reveals that the Whitehall Evening Post is authoritative with regard to her late-career publishing activities. Its proprietor for many years was Charles Corbett, the Fleet Street bookseller and publisher known to Fielding scholars as one of the publishers of The Champion.24 He and Haywood had worked together since the Fame days, at least. In 1749 when questioned by the authorities in connection with the Henry Goring pamphlet, he testified that he had known her ‘many years’ and acknowledged having ‘sold several things Wrote & Published by’ her.25 Corbett was a book man of substance with his hand in a number of major undertakings and a private house in Islington. According to Michael Harris, he was ‘consistently associated with the production of anti-Walpole material’.26 He published in February 1741 Hatchett’s never-performed play The Chinese Orphan, and his name appears on the imprint of the one-shilling pamphlet-poem The Equity of Parnassus (1744), both of which were sold at Fame. The Chinese Orphan would later find renewed life in the compilation The Diverting Jumble, a collection of previously published pamphlets and plays amusingly subtitled They Shall be Saved that would come out in 1754 under a Corbett imprint. By 1756 the Whitehall Evening Post was owned and published by Charles Corbett the younger, later Sir Charles, who succeeded to the family publish-

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ing business in 1752.27 Under both father and son the paper served as principle publicity conduit for what can be called, with little exaggeration, the Haywood public relations industry. Corbett had commercial ties with Thomas Gardner, who published Haywood’s most important work during the last twelve years of her life, that may have gone back to the early 1740s.28 The pair had been associated with The Champion from July 1741.29 Gardner brought out A Present for a Servant-Maid in 1743 and The Fortunate Foundlings in January 1744, and was copyright holder for many of her best-known and most important works, including four politically inflected works that feature in this study: The Female Spectator, The Parrot, Epistles for the Ladies, and The Invisible Spy. By Spedding’s count he published ‘all but three’ of her ‘last fifteen works’.30 His shop was near Corbett’s at the western edge of the City, on Fleet Street in the Temple Bar vicinity in an area with a high concentration of members of the print trade, including personnel linked with ‘the production of opposition newspapers’.31 Gardner took in advertisements for the Whitehall Evening Post. He had oppositional and possibly Jacobite credentials.32 Given the long-standing and well-documented links between Corbett and Gardner, it seems safe to say that the obituary notice was prepared by Gardner or under his direction, which explains why all the items in the publication list are Gardner titles, and likewise accounts for the otherwise perplexing omission of some of her best-known works, such as Love in Excess, that were published in the pre-Gardner days. The selectivity of the publication list is actually evidence for its authority. The distinction between author and editor that I want to insist on may seem small but it is not trivial, for it reframes the way we regard her as a literary professional. Haywood is no longer the ‘bedraggled’ Grub Street hack churning out copy for her bookseller, nor the attractive but anachronistic male-impersonating ‘one-woman show’ advanced for our applause in some accounts.33 Rather, she is an editor and chief writer whose job would have included obtaining contributions from other writers and coordinating production with printers, publishers and distributors and other book trade personnel – with Corbett, Gardner and doubtless others. She was part of the business of print, public opinion and politics. Although the complex organization of this shadowy sector of mid-century London is becoming somewhat clearer as the result of painstaking detective work by newspaper historians, and although Haywood’s multiple identities as shopkeeper, small-scale publisher, and professional author are well established, it seldom occurs to scholars to explore Haywood’s embeddedness in ‘the trade’. This inattention stems in part from the ‘insistence on singularity’ – the singular heroine and the singular heroine-writer – in the interpretive models used by feminist critics and literary historians in the effort to undo what Nancy K. Miller was one of the first to analyze as the premature foreclosure of the question of female agency.34 Critical approaches designed to recover female authorial

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agency tend to favour elements of subversion, defiance, or rebellion that speak to post-Romantic feminist desires at the expense of elements that connect the eighteenth-century writer to her own time and place. For a case in point we need look no further than the way Haywood’s Female Spectator is often presumed to be some version of Haywood herself. Her admission in the opening number that she gave over her youth to pleasure and ‘promiscuous’ diversions becomes a revelation of Haywood’s own dubious past – never mind the period fascination with public role-playing and Haywood’s own Fantomina-like flair for shape-shifting, to say nothing of the unlikelihood that a writer as fully extended as Haywood would have found time to devote herself ‘for some years’ to the continuous round of dissipation ascribed to the eidolon.35 Attributions of a scandalous past may partly satisfy present cravings for ‘foremothers’ behaving badly but they underplay the ways women’s texts are governed by the generic codes and conventions of their own literary moment, in this instance the conventions of the periodical persona, and they tend to obscure the collaborative dimensions of women’s writing lives. Feminist criticism has shown itself adept at imagining female communities, traditions, and lineages but when it comes to working out relations of women writers to mainstream (hence nearly always male) structures of literary production its models are not very subtle. In the case of The Female Spectator interpretive models are further impoverished by the tendency of literary scholars to overstate the role of the author in journalistic enterprises, a tendency not limited to work on women. William Coley, editor of the Wesleyan edition of The Champion – the oppositional paper often described, tellingly, as ‘Fielding’s’– points out that critics ‘assume unduly that the Champion was “his” in almost every sense’ when in fact, as Coley demonstrates in minute detail, it was the product of the shared effort of writers, printers, advertisers, booksellers, and an editorial team that included Fielding’s co-editor, James Ralph, the political journalist and future Leicester House propagandist who would come to seem almost a shadow partner in Haywood’s future political endeavours. Coley’s warning to literary scholars that historians of the press in the eighteenth century have ‘objected increasingly to such an author-centred approach to journalist texts’ needs to be heeded by Haywood scholars.36 Harris argues similarly that, despite intensive investigation, Fielding’s relationship to The Champion ‘remains out of focus’. The work environment in which the paper was produced was one ‘in which the interests of booksellers, printers, advertisers and readers intersected in a particularly dynamic way’ with the result that it is hard to make out precisely Fielding’s role ‘as author’ within ‘this complicated system’.37 A monthly essay-paper was not nearly so complicated an enterprise as the tri-weekly Champion, but The Female Spectator was a commercial entity all the same and intended to make money for its owner or shareholders. (None of the actual financial arrangements have survived, of course.) The image of a ‘little

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society’ of women of ‘refin’d Taste’ meeting two evenings a week under genteel circumstances to plan and edit the next elegant amusement is a pleasant fiction, but scholars should not be misled. The monthly existence of The Female Spectator required the ongoing efforts of a production team that would have included a publisher, print-shop personnel, bookkeepers, advertisers and distributors, as well as an editor and chief writer. It was seen earlier that the ‘Authors’ of The Female Spectator acknowledged early in its run certain ‘great Helps’ received from ‘Persons whom they are not authoriz’d to name’. In language that would have been recognized as allusive, the notice refers also to the ‘Spirit’ that ‘will run thro’ the whole of the Undertaking’.38 To many contemporaries the word spirit would have conjured the spirit of liberty, that ‘true old English Spirit’ that Bolingbroke insisted ‘prevail’d in the Days of our Fathers’,39 and it would have recalled the ‘Publick Spirit’ that the Chesterfield-sponsored paper Common Sense sought to revive in order to inspire a true love of country. The politically coded language used to promote the new ‘monthly pamphlet’ raises questions that are perhaps unanswerable. Who were these persons who must remain unnamed? Did they provide copy? Encouragement and financial support? Was The Female Spectator produced with political backing? If so, who were the sponsors? That such questions lack ready answers does not discount their importance since merely to pose them opens the critical imagination to a new set of possibilities. The Female Spectator was a polite and gay entertainment, to be sure, but it was also public-spirited in a Bolingbrokean fashion and, as will be seen, unmistakeably aligned with the anti-Carteret, antiHanoverian Patriot opposition.

Book 8, Mr Politico and Discursive Communities Book 8, published on 4 December 1744, features a satiric exchange between the Female Spectator and an obviously invented adversarius, a dim-witted coffeehouse politician named Curioso Politico who taxes the Female Spectator with having failed in the previous numbers to address matters ‘of a higher and more public nature’ – high politics, that is.40 Haywood used this amusingly clueless political animal to insert overt political discussion into the essays. Signs of a ‘generous and public-spirited’ Patriotism à la Bolingbroke had actually been there almost from the start, the Female Spectator insists in one of the final numbers.41 In Book 2, for example, she credits the recently declared war on France with reviving the true spirit of public virtue and English manliness: young men called to military duty will ‘throw aside all the softening Luxuries of their silken Youth’, modern ‘Coxcombs and Finikins’ will be toughened to an old-fashioned English virility and even the gentleman left-behinds will replace their ‘foreign Silk Brocades’ with ‘downright English Cloth’.42 Thus will the resurgence of manly

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patriotism – spurred on by female patriots like the Female Spectator – reverse the national decline into luxury, effeminacy, and indolence. Patriot themes are sounded in Book 3 where avarice, luxury, and ‘false delicacy’ are condemned as ills corrosive of modern life. Interestingly, these ills are said to date from the ‘fatal Year 1720’, the year of the South Sea Bubble, when an ‘extravagant itch’ for gambling of all sorts began to spread through all social classes like a contagion.43 ‘Times like these require Corrosives, not Balsams to amend’; the evil has ‘already eaten into the very Bowels of public Happiness’.44 It is as if the corruption and decline that once had been centred in the Great Man and his immediate associates back in the Eovaai days had seeped outward to diffuse the entire social order. But in these opening numbers the politics are part of the weave of her Patriot-inflected social criticism. In Book 8 and Book 9 the social criticism begins to assume a more distinctively political shape and the commentary turns from moral tales and genteel entertainment to take up the particulars of contemporary political life. The heightened attention to politics in Books 8 and 9, published in November and December 1744, is partly a function of the natural rhythms of the political calendar, which would pull public affairs back into view at this time of year. The opening on 4 November of a new Parliamentary session brought the inevitable surge in new political publications – books, pamphlets, ballads, broadsides, new essay-papers – as well as intensification of political coverage in the existing dailies and tri-weeklies. These same months, it is intriguing to note, coincided with a flurry of publicity for The Female Spectator. A verse puff that ran in the widely read Gentleman’s Magazine in December pays tribute to the learning and virtue of the ‘fair philosophers’ in terms that are perfectly consonant with the periodical’s reputation as a journal focused on women and their concerns: Learn’d in the weaker sex in every state, You shew a judgment more than man’s complete. Women, the heart of women best can reach; While men from maxims – you from practice teach.45

But elsewhere in the press a sharply different image of the periodical was under construction. In early January the strongly oppositional political paper Old England, or, The Constitutional Journal gave The Female Spectator a prominent notice that stressed its broadly public themes during ‘degenerate Times’, degenerate being one of those coded Patriot terms suggestive of the whole battle between virtue and corruption. Jeffrey Broadbottom, the voice of Old England, congratulates not only ‘the fair Sex’ but also ‘my own’ in having found a ‘polite and elegant Advocate for private Virtue’ who will also, crucially, promote the ‘true foundation’ of ‘public Spirit’.46 In addition, it was in early January 1745 that the Fame frontispiece was first made available for purchase in conjunction with the issuing of Book 9.47 All this amounts to a concerted public relations effort intended to

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attract readers from across the press spectrum, from Gentleman’s to the violently anti-ministerial Old England Journal. At the same time the endorsement from Jeffrey Broadbottom signals more strongly the alignment with the ‘Broad-Bottom’ faction that would soon find itself part of the government. If Mr Politico in Book 8 was a convenient device for ‘going political’ at the beginning of the parliamentary season, he also gave Haywood an opening to satirize a species of masculine arrogance she plainly hoped to see relegated to the cultural trash bin. A would-be wit, he is in fact a very dunce not least in the pride he takes in his low opinion of ‘your Sex as Authors’.48 He complains that she has failed to deliver on the promise to address affairs of state, carping that she is too much the female, not enough the public-minded patriot: the ‘Sieges, Battles, Rencounters and Escapes that have filled the World with Clamour’ have failed to stir ‘the peaceful Bosom of the Female Spectator’. The ad feminem abuse continues in his pronouncement that her essays are the tittle-tattle of an ‘idle, prating, gossiping old Woman’ fit only to divert ‘little Children or Matrons, more antiquated than yourself ’ and thus beneath the notice of a Curioso Politico and the constituency he fancies himself to represent, the wits and men of fashion who congregate in ‘polite Coffee-Houses’.49 This is rich. A woman’s failure to meddle in politics is called down by a man whose failed grasp of political complexity will soon be exposed. That Mr Politico is imagined as writing from White’s Chocolate House, an ultra-fashionable St James men’s club attended by leading political figures of both parties, is part of the fun, for it was her aim to mock the preening self-importance of the self-infatuated male political animal.50 A dim misogynist, Mr Politico is also a bad reader unable to penetrate the Female Spectator’s strategies and purposes. More clued-in readers would have known that her promise to use a ‘Key to unlock the Cabinet of Princes’ and to supply intelligence from ‘Spies’ in ‘all the Places of Resort in and about this great Metropolis’ was meant to imply a different and altogether spicier genre: the secret history with its familiar pleasures of real-life intrigue, coded scandal, and ‘keyhole’ glimpses of erotic and political shenanigans at the highest levels.51 She later acknowledges the bait-and-switch, confessing she sought to entice with promises of roman à clef scandals: ‘Tales, and little Stories to which every one might flatter themselves with being able to find a Key’.52 But her purposes, she insists, were always ‘more generous and public-spirited’ than they might have seemed. She also jibes at the masculine credulity that reposes its faith in the newspapers, ‘daily Romances’ she mockingly calls them, and continues to laugh at him: surely nobody ‘but this Letter-Writer’ expected that ‘these Lucubrations should be devoted merely to the Use of News-Mongers’.53 Coffee-house news addicts fail to recognize that much of what passes for fact in the papers is actually fiction, and the satire here, as Carnell observes, effectively ridicules the ‘assumption that the best way of commenting on the political public sphere would be to repeat the factual reports of “News Mongers”’.54 Moreover, our Mr Politico

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is all the more the fool for failing to recognize the value of what is on offer. In a passage shimmering with Austenian irony he dismisses these essays as consisting of no more than ‘Home-Amours, Reflections on Human Nature, the Passions, Morals, Inferences, and Warnings to your own Sex’, as if reflections on human nature were trifling stuff.55 The satire of Mr Politico is a satisfying but finally somewhat predictable send up of a kind of retro-misogynist that women writers of the period took pleasure in ridiculing. A more original contribution to eighteenth-century proto-feminist discourse may be detected in the contrast Haywood establishes between him and the more respectful male figures populating the other numbers. The Female Spectator’s ambition to be ‘as universally read as possible’ targets not just men, it turns out, but men in high places.56 The fact that Mr Politico’s letter is datelined from White’s Chocolate House, a resort for fashionable men at the court-end of the town is therefore significant. His report that The Female Spectator is read by ‘most of the Wits, as well as Men of Fashion I converse with’ conveys that female public speech has penetrated deep into elite masculine enclaves.57 Women’s words may rile the likes of a Mr Politico but his sputtering denigrations of women are all but sluiced away by the outpouring of admiring testimonies from other male correspondents who are, to a man, appreciative and respectful. They address the female editor from a variety of venues and physical locations: from coffeehouses and taverns, from the Inner Temple, Westminster, the City, Oxford. They seek her opinion or shower her with praise, or both – like the Querist from Bedford-Head Tavern in Covent Garden who asks the Female Spectator to settle a dispute among a ‘Set of Gentlemen who are most of them your Subscribers, and all Admirers of your Speculations’.58 The gender-reversing irony is sweet: where Mr Spectator sought to furnish ‘reasonable Women’ with matter for ‘TeaTable-Talk’, now a group of women furnish tavern-talk for a new generation of reasonable men.59 Mr Politico may disparage women’s abilities but it is implied that he is a relic of the misogynist past. Other male correspondents voice their admiration for women’s reasoning powers, like A. B., dazzled by the arguments advanced by two debating women: ‘my Reason yielded to them both by Turns:--I was convinced, confuted, and convinced again as often as either of them spoke’.60 The cumulative effect of these multiple testimonies to women’s minds is to affirm and, as we might say today, ‘naturalize’ the presence of women in the political public sphere and, by modelling more egalitarian exchanges between men and women, to leverage new discursive space for women’s intellectual and cultural ambitions. It is impossible to tell how many of the letters incorporated into The Female Spectator are real and how many invented, but Mr Politico’s nonsense advances so deftly her satire on male prejudice and serves so handily her aim of imagining a female-friendly discursive public sphere that he must be accounted a fiction, perhaps the most successful of an unknowable number of such creations.

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One of Haywood’s achievements in The Female Spectator was to construct over the course of its run a cumulative image of political London as a discursive community hospitable to the voices and perceptions of women. Arguably, she elaborated for her generation the idea of a ‘polite’ urban culture that extends learning to women and takes them seriously as moral and intellectual beings. A substantial part of the periodical consists of correspondence, and as Eve Tavor Bannet has pointed out, letters coming from men with names such as ‘PhiloNaturae’ and ‘Philo Astrologio’ amount to ‘convenient digests of such subjects as botany and zoology, the plurality of worlds, and the immortality of the soul’. Haywood thus contrives to promote modes of female learning that, refreshingly, put women at the centre and relegate male correspondents to a ‘purely instrumental and subservient role in relation to the female world’.61 From the 1690s, periodicals had announced quite forthrightly their goal of disseminating knowledge in the lower ranks.62 At mid-century, speaking for the rising and expanding ‘polite’ world, Haywood repackaged the educational venture as an expression of genteel, leisured culture available in something like equal measure to women and men. Each cross-gendered exchange gives added solidity to an imagined community in which men enter into dialogue with thoughtful women and seek their counsel on an astonishingly wide range of issues, many of which fall outside what was usually considered woman’s sphere, and in which women respond with an invigorating confidence.63 This is an idealized community, to be sure. The author of Fantomina or The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless could have harboured few illusions about the real state of relations between the sexes in either private or public life, but the orchestration of multiple discursive voices in The Female Spectator presents Haywood in an attractive guise: the feminist myth-maker who forges images of a social order more suitable for women than the one in which they now live; a model of female-friendly possibilities that promotes respect for women’s intellectual dignity in ways that anticipate the conjunction of virtue and learning more often associated with the Bluestockings of the next generation. Taken together the twenty-four books of The Female Spectator create a lively image of a group of enlightened, self-reliant, civic-minded, intellectually serious, and fully adult women who are welcomed into the discursive life of the metropolis.

The ‘Right to Know’ In her response to Mr Politico, Haywood takes up a right endlessly asserted in the Patriot press in the forties: the people’s ‘right to know’. Nowadays freedom of the press is often thought to mean the freedom to say what one wishes, but Haywood and her contemporaries were more attuned to the potential dangers of freedom of expression and had little trouble exempting whole categories of publications from the rights associated with the liberty of the press. What mattered more was

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what we would call access to information, that is, the freedom to inquire into and report on the conduct of the government, especially (on the opposition side) such conduct as redounded to the discredit of authority or served to expose official lies and misrepresentations – those ‘massive Buildings erected by Enchantment’, as the Female Spectator would have it, adding drily, ‘But I will not pretend to measure what Extent of Power the Guardian Angel entitled the Liberty of the Press may yet retain.’64 The linkages between liberty, truth, and public spirit were harped upon in the opposition press generally and touted in the opening number of Remarks on the History of England, first published in The Craftsman (1730– 1), where Bolingbroke, as ‘Humphrey Oldcastle’, credits The Craftsman with the new spirit of inquiry abroad in the land. ‘Few People enquired; fewer grumbled; none clamour’d; all acquiesced’ before Craftsman; now ‘Every Man enquires with Eagerness and examines with Freedom’. Oldcastle endorses this spirit of inquiry: ‘in a Country, circumstanced like ours, and under a Government constituted like ours, the People had a Right to be inform’d and to reason about publick Affairs’.65 Public inquiry was understood to be fundamental to the preservation of liberty and therefore a distinctively British pursuit. Talk of liberty of the press in Book 8 seems at first an unexceptionable rehashing of opposition commonplaces, but closer examination reveals that many of her points line up quite closely with extreme strands of popular radical thought. Mid-century radicalism has received relatively little attention in historical studies, although the materials are there for a study of ‘those who laid the foundations for the rapid flowering of radical activity in the later 1760s’.66 It may come as a surprise that Haywood contributed to this efflorescence. The Female Spectator begins with a sentiment which few, even on the ministerial side, would challenge: the ‘Public may reasonably desire and expect to be let into the Knowledge of Affairs which relate chiefly to themselves.’ Almost immediately, however, the thought turns radical by taking up an assertive language of rights that extends to all tax-paying subjects – not just property owners as might be expected. No, the ‘meanest Person’ has ‘an equal Right’ with the ‘most Opulent’ to ‘expect a satisfactory Account in every thing relating to the Common-Wealth’ precisely because they pay the taxes.67 Indeed, ‘Every one’ who ‘contributes to the Support of the Government’ has the ‘Right to be protected by the Government in any decent Attempt made for the Discovery of iniquitous Practices’ at the highest levels – among ministers, admirals, and generals, for example.68 This mode of reasoning had been in the air for a few years. In 1740 The Livery Man: Or, Plain Thoughts on Publick Affairs, addressed to the lovers of Truth and Liberty, argued that people had the right to inquire into public affairs, express their sentiments freely, and declare their sense of their grievances on the grounds that excise taxes on commodities are paid even by ‘mean People’: ‘Is there a Man in England who does not either drink Beer, wear Shoes, or now and then smoak a Pipe of Tobacco?’69

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The strategic linkage between taxation and ‘the right to know’ is rare enough in the 1740s to be called by a leading press historian an ‘unusually radical’ manoeuvre. Unaware of Haywood’s work in this area, he is able to point to only three anonymous pamphlets that make this connection.70 One, The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated (1742), reissued under the title The New Opposition Compared with the Old In Point of Principles and Practice (1744), is notable in part because the argument is strikingly similar to that in The Female Spectator and, as will be seen, her next periodical, The Parrot (1746). Since ‘the lowest Fellow in the Kingdom’ pays taxes it is ‘but just’ that he should ‘know what he pays for, and see, if he can see, whether the Public is well served or not’.71 The tangy vigour of its language recalls that of The Female Spectator in its mockery, for example, of the ‘Mischiefs that are supposed to flow from these Doctrines [which serve as] meer Bugbears and Chimera’s, a Sort of Rawheads and Bloodybones, invented by political Nurses to fright their Children from squalling’.72 This is not to suggest that Haywood wrote the pamphlet or the pamphlet-writer wrote portions of The Female Spectator, although neither possibility can be excluded, but it is to say that passages of the periodical are drenched in the rhetoric and extreme oppositional thought of the moment and, like a handful of pamphlets from around the same time, they foreshadow efforts during ‘the early years of George III’s reign to relate … taxation and the right to vote’. In the 1740s such arguments were ‘atypical’, the ‘vast bulk’ of oppositional opinion at this time being ‘notably conservative in its implications’.73 The emphasis on taxation rather than property would have been rejected by mainstream Whigs. According to H. T. Dickinson, ‘most Whigs regarded as dangerous and absurd the notion that labouring poor should have any voice in the decision-making processes of the state’. They ‘might be allowed to enjoy the benefits of the rule of law under a limited monarchy, but they must be denied the positive right to choose their governors or to supervise the conduct of those in positions of authority’.74 The linkage forged in The Female Spectator between liberty, political rights, and the system of taxation would seem to place Haywood in advance of her moment and show her to be far more of a populist, at least on this issue, than has been recognized – assuming of course that she wrote this passage. But even if the words are those of a contributor, it should serve as a stimulus to further study to find that Haywood in her editorial function is so closely aligned with this small burst of mid-forties radical thought.

Book 9, ‘State-Harpys’ and Old England The Patriot commitments of the Female Spectator emerge full blown in Book 9. Published on 4 January 1745, this number responds directly to the political tensions of its moment. Outcry over the 16,000 Hanoverian troops in British pay had subsided somewhat since the clamour of the previous winter, but dis-

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gruntlement over George II’s alleged pro-Hanoverian foreign policy continued to fill the opposition press and fuel parliamentary debate. Book 9 begins with a lengthy discussion of British foreign policy conducted via the unusual expedient of a dialogue between two female disputants, a Hanoverian and an English lady.75 The dialogue has been praised by critics who have seen in the ‘moderation and sweetness’ of the female debaters a ‘model of polite, mannered public debate that contrasts sharply with the more strident pamphlet wars’.76 There is some truth to this, but it must be said that the sweet moderation accommodates some rather sharp anti-Hanoverian jabs and more than a little scornful sarcasm from the English Lady’s quarter, as when she ridicules her Hanoverian counterpart’s concern over the aggrandizing tendency of France as ‘Bug-bear Stories of universal Monarchy’ and deploys oppositional absolutes as conversation stoppers (‘Liberty is a meer Chimera’ under the present ministry).77 The English Lady can indeed be more than a little insulting: Britain is an injured wife, Hanover a ‘petty State’ and ‘tawdry’ ‘little Mistress’.78 Perhaps Haywood intended to deliver a lesson in the use of politeness as a polemical weapon, for this is a Patriot attack carried on under a thin veneer of feminine politeness. But a remarkable change in register is about to occur as the Female Spectator shifts suddenly into the present tense. The voice that has informed virtually every passage of the periodical, by turns sardonic, earnest, stern, but always worldly and practical, becomes soaringly panegyrical when the heart-gladdening news is announced: ‘Even now while I am writing, a Messenger of Joy arrives,’ she writes, and ‘Fame sounds her Golden-Trump with Energy Divine’. News of the triumph of the reinvigorated ‘Patriot Band’, those ‘uncorrupted few’, is delivered in purest Patriotese: ‘Our Island’s Genius rouses from his dreary Bed – shakes off inglorious Sloth, and once more active, inspires his chosen Sons with Godlike Fires to quell Oppression, save the sinking State, and recall long banish’d Virtue to her ancient Seat’.79 The intensely moralized prose, abounding in the allegorical abstractions that march through Patriot discourse generally, echoes Bolingbroke, sometimes very closely. His pronouncement in History of England that ‘There are Men, many we think, who have not bow’d the Knee to Baal, nor worship’d the brazen Image’ becomes the Female Spectator’s praise of those who have held fast amidst ‘all the Numbers that have renounced their God, and bowed the knee to Baal’.80 This panegyric must be read in relation to the formation of a new government in the winter of 1744–5. The unpopular Lord Granville, formerly Lord Carteret, had been forced to resign in late November, and negotiations quickly began to put together a coalition ministry that would admit key members of the opposition. By Christmas recess the new ‘Broad-Bottom’ government had been announced. It included representatives from across the political spectrum, Whig dissidents (George Lyttleton and George Grenville among them) but also, for the first time since their proscription in 1714, Tories. There was ‘dazed eupho-

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ria’ in some Tory quarters.81 The abstract nature of the Fame passage in Book 9 makes it hard to be sure, but it would seem that the ‘great Work’ announced by Fame’s trumpet is the imminent punishment of Granville and his followers, the fallen ‘Canker-Worms of State’. The speaker keeps circling back in excitement to a petition for an enquiry into various crimes committed by unnamed ‘StateHarpys’ that would debar these evil counsellors from all state offices and preserve the ‘Royal Ear’ from the ‘poison’ of their advice. The speaker savours the punishments to be meted out to these canker worms too long suffered to ‘gnaw even into the very Vitals of our Constitution’.82 What is behind this outburst of Patriot excitement? In an earlier essay I suggested that this passage may have been a way to tell members of the Broad-Bottom coalition that her pen was at their service.83 Jeffrey Broadbottom’s endorsement in the Old England Journal, dated 12 January 1745, suggests the alternative possibility that she had been commissioned by one of the anti-Carteret factions, conceivably by James Ralph, one of the editors of Old England Journal, to comment specifically on the Broad-Bottom transition then underway. Old England was founded by the Earl of Chesterfield as a vehicle for advancing his thwarted ambitions and those of his friends who had also been shut out of the post-Walpole ministry. With its ties with parliamentary politics at the highest levels, Old England played a leading role in the anti-Hanoverian press campaign of 1742–4, decrying the ‘apostasy’ of Carteret and Pulteney (Haywood’s ‘Curio’ in the Patriot effusion) and denouncing the misconduct of the war as part of a campaign to foment popular hostility to the government, what Chesterfield described in a letter to Lord Gower as blowing ‘the Hanover Flame to height’.84 The work of the day-to-day writing fell mostly to two men, the Whig historians and polemicists William Guthrie and James Ralph. The latter, whom we have encountered before, is an intriguingly recurrent figure in the Haywood story. Ralph is remembered today for his friendships with Benjamin Franklin and later Henry Fielding, but to his contemporaries he was ‘one of the greatest political … Writers of the present Age’.85 In our own time he has been described, along with Guthrie, as the ‘most formidable propagandist since Bolingbroke’.86 Ralph’s career keeps crossing Haywood’s in suggestive ways. In the 1720s and 1730s they seem to have proceeded along similar and perhaps converging lines. She began public life as an actress, playwright and poet. Failing to achieve recognition in these areas, she turned to marketplace writing to produce, among a great many other things, the scandal chronicles that irked Pope and secured her the lasting notoriety of an episode in The Dunciad. Ralph had also failed to succeed as a serious poet and playwright and he too found himself pilloried as a dunce after rather incautiously publishing a defence of Pope’s dunces. He helped Fielding manage the playhouse at the Haymarket during the famous 1737 season. Odds are Haywood and Ralph were already acquainted, but they

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certainly would have been from at least spring 1737 when she joined the troupe at the Haymarket. In the early 1740s he would team up with Fielding to co-edit The Champion and stay on as sole editor long after Fielding’s departure. He was closely associated over two decades with most of the leading oppositional journals, including Common Sense (1739), Old England (1744), The Remembrancer (1747–51), and Protestor (1753). By 1743 he had come into Dodington’s orbit as his personal secretary and propagandist, compiling The Critical History of the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole (1743). In 1743–5 he wrote as Jeffrey Broadbottom for the Old England Journal. Of the Use and Abuses of Parliaments; Two Historical Discourses in two volumes was published in 1744. From 1744–6 his History of England was published serially. Haywood and James seem to have joined forces in the winter of 1744–5 and then again in the late 1740s and early 1750s, when he edited the Leicester House organ The Remembrancer and later, after the death of Frederick the prince of Wales, The Protestor. Both Haywood and Ralph wrote against the Jew Bill of 1753.87 In 1753 he received a pension of £300 out of secret service accounts.88 But to return to the mid-1740s. Old England Journal, the most successful of the opposition newspapers in the years immediately following Walpole’s resignation, ‘maintained an unusual degree of virulence in its attacks on Lord Carteret’s administration and the Hanoverian connection’.89 One government pamphleteer complained that Old England, along with the oppositional Westminster Journal, managed to ‘out-do all that went before them in virulence, scandal, and violence’. (Interestingly, it is in these two papers that The Female Spectator was promoted by Jeffrey Broadbottom.) The same source added, ‘I should fill a volume did I attempt quoting the seditious, insolent, even treasonable paragraphs’ of Old England ‘tho’ it be scarce a year’s standing’.90 Alarm was voiced privately by those close to the ministry. Sir Charles Hanbury Williams wrote to Henry Fox on 9 October 1743: ‘’Tis impossible to write two more inflaming & malicious papers than the two journals you send me.’91 Williams described a later issue as more outspoken ‘than any other Paper that has been published in that Journal or indeed any other Paper I have read’ but conceded the ‘stile’ to be ‘good and very inflammatory’.92 It is in this context of violent opposition to the government that Jeffrey Broadbottom’s 12 January plug for The Female Spectator must be read.93 The personal endorsement is prominently placed at the top of the second page immediately following Jeffrey’s lead essay. He purports to act upon a request from his sister, Maltida, that he recommend to his readers ‘a Monthly Pamphlet, entitled, the Female Spectator’. The ‘principal Authoress’ is Maltida’s ‘particular Friend’. (This was not the first time Haywood can be suspected of contriving to get her work promoted in the opposition press by way of the fiction of a female intercessor. As was seen earlier, a similar planted request – this one from ‘Mrs. Graspal’, the character played by Haywood in her play A Wife to be

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Lett, pressing for a revival of the comedy – appeared in the Jacobite Mist’s in the mid-twenties.) Jeffrey responded with copy that ran to two paragraphs immediately following the leader of Old England No. 92 and would be reproduced for many months to come, almost immediately in the strongly oppositional London Evening Post for 15 January. Jeffrey claims that he ‘seldom read Productions of that Nature’ but agreed to look into the ‘above-mentioned Pamphlet’ at the ‘earnest Request of my Sister Maltida’. To his surprise, he is impressed: I cannot help congratulating, not only the fair Sex, but my own, in having, during these degenerate Times, in the FEMALE SPECTATOR, a polite and elegant Advocate for private Virtue, the true Foundation of that public Spirit, which my labours have ever endeavoured to promote.

These words would become a recurring  feature in the extensive publicity for The Female Spectator, and in subsequent notices the connection with Old England is always underscored: ‘See the Old England Journal, Jan 12, No. 92’. The references to public spirit and the degeneracy of the times would inevitably have carried a strongly oppositional valence. Contemporary readers would have known what today must be spelled out by newspaper historians, that Broadbottom’s endorsement of their shared commitment to virtue (as against the implied ministerial corruption) links The Female Spectator to an anti-Carteret, anti-Hanoverian campaign orchestrated for the last two years by Chesterfield and conducted by his surrogates, one of the chief among them James Ralph, on the pages of the Old England Journal. It is hard to believe it coincidental that The Female Spectator was promoted by Jeffrey Broadbottom at the very moment that the ‘Broad-Bottom’ coalition was taking office, but it is puzzling to try to figure out where Haywood fits in any of this. The effort to see beyond this endorsement towards some understanding of behind-the-scenes arrangements is again so much peering in the dark, and in this instance interpretation is complicated by issues of timing. This number is the same one in which Jeffrey Broadbottom departs the paper in self-congratulatory triumph, Chesterfield, the primary backer, having gained the long-sought prize of a place in the government. Jeffrey rejoices in the likelihood of the country ‘being, at last, faithfully serv’d in many of her most important posts’. Newspaper historians tell us that at this point Chesterfield, his thirst for office now slaked, withdrew his support of Old England while at around the same time the principle writers, Ralph and Guthrie, were pensioned off by the new government.94 The paper continued to speak in the voice of Jeffrey Broadbottom but under new editorship. On 26 January the new authors (their identity is not known) announced just under the first-page banner that the paper would press onward

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in the same spirit – and indeed it did, ironically enough, by vigorously opposing the newly established Broad-Bottom administration. Is it significant that The Female Spectator is largely silent on political matters in the remaining numbers? (The partial exception, Book 18, will be considered shortly.) Had Haywood been bought off as well? Alternatively, was the publicity offered by Old England at the time the paper was changing hands a reward for services rendered? Is it relevant that Haywood’s shop at Fame was situated on the ground floor of a house owned by the politically ambitious Duke of Bedford? That she had dedicated the second of four collected volumes, which included Books 8 and 9, to the Duchess of Bedford, whose husband and father, both active in the Broad-Bottom opposition, had both been admitted into the new ministry?95 Had Haywood been given instructions to insert polemical material at a critical moment under the cover of writing a gay, polite and inoffensive monthly offering for the ladies? Or, as seems distantly possible, were the new proprietors seeking to secure her services? None of these questions has clear answers, but enough evidence has emerged to throw in doubt the assertion that ‘as a female hack without a political patron, it is unlikely Haywood regarded herself as significant in promoting any party ideology.’96 It seems strongly possible that Haywood did write as a paid political propagandist during this phase of her career and not impossible that she wrote some or all of of The Female Spectator with the support of a highly placed patron or at least one of his surrogates.

Book 18 and the Forty-Five At the end of Book 18 – a meditation on lying, published on 19 October 1745, the day after the king opened the parliamentary session – the Female Spectator declares a change of mind. She had intended to bring ‘our Lucubrations’ to an end but will continue on account of hints received lately from ‘Persons of the most distinguished Capacities, on Subjects universally interesting’ who ‘assure us, they would transmit their Sentiments to the World by no other Canal’.97 The six books that follow are dominated by letters from correspondents on a wide range of matters, none of them explicitly political. This inattention to politics is all the more striking when read against the rapt attention given in most sectors of the press to the Jacobite invasion that had begun in Scotland and soon threatened England. Indeed, one press historian goes so far as to say that ‘all’ London papers, even those which ordinarily avoided political commentary, ‘contributed to the deluge of anti-popery and anti-Jacobite polemic that streamed from London’s presses during the height of the rebellion.’98 The Female Spectator is notably silent on the subject of the ‘Forty-Five’. Alarm over the rebellion was at its height when Book 18 was published. Jacobite forces had landed in Scotland in late July. By 17 August news began to reach

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the London papers.99 Three weeks later, on 21 September, the Jacobites scored a shocking victory at the battle of Prestonpans. At first the press downplayed the seriousness of these events, dismissing the invasion force as ill-equipped and unprepared, but English complacency took an abrupt volte-face when the English troops were defeated at Prestonpans. Even Old England Journal, which had been pounding away at the ministry for its mishandling of the war on the continent, threw its support behind the government, and other strenuously oppositional journals now counselled ‘readers to show resolution and unanimity in opposing the Jacobite threat’ and joined nearly ‘all other elements of the London press in supporting the wave of defensive loyalism that overtook popular opinion towards the end of September’ when the rebellion was at its height.100 Read against this background of loyalist fervour, the flat absence of support for the Hanoverian regime in The Female Spectator seems revelatory. In Book 18, where one would expect to find pro-Hanoverian sentiment, one finds instead a worried meditation upon the proliferation of untruths in a corrupt society that fosters credulity and systematically spawns lies. The Female Spectator would have her readers believe that ‘Politics at this Conjuncture’ are ‘too ticklish for us to meddle with’, but we might speculate today that her unwillingness to ‘meddle’ represents an admirable refusal to succumb to the spirit of mindless and even hysterical loyalty that was sweeping over the country at this time.101 Haywood was fascinated at all times with lies, secrecy, and hidden lives, and in her secret histories and scandal chronicles, Memoirs of a Certain Island in particular, she used sensationalized fictions to expose private wrongdoings that lay outside the reach of established judicial remedies and to administer such justice as could be meted out through the punitive action of the press. In a sense, she was a forerunner of investigative reporting, using the resources of story-telling to shift the boundaries between disclosure and secrecy or, to put it another way, between public and private. In the 1740s, beginning (it would seem) with her stint as an oppositional publisher at Fame, Haywood took up politically engaged writing on a fuller scale than has been imagined. Earlier themes – seduction, the vulnerability of the powerless, the dangers of credulity, the allure of private revenge – took new, more public-sphere forms. Book 18 addresses in a particularly urgent form the way representations in the press – printed lies, she would call them – had come to shape public perceptions to an unprecedented extent in a world that was increasingly the product of the enmeshment of politics and the print media. In such an environment untruth flourishes: even if Mr TellTruth’s unprintable remarks on ‘the present Posture of our Affairs’ were to reach print, they would not be believed. It is possible that the Female Spectator expresses Haywood’s own distressed response to the miasma of lies, fictions, and evasions that cloud the collective vision of a populace desiring to remain well-deceived – certainly the sentiments she expresses are consistent with their

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author’s utterances elsewhere. The infatuated people choose to believe ‘only the most gross Impositions’; they reject ‘Things as they really are’ and swallow whole ‘absurd and preposterous Stories’ fed to the public by those whose interest it is to mislead.102 Haywood seems less interested in berating government manipulation of the truth than in exposing the complicity of ‘the people’ in their own delusions. In a small way the Female Spectator enacts the dynamic of suppression herself when she declines to print Mr. Tell-Truth’s letter and in this way mimics the recent government clampdown on free speech (Habeas Corpus had been suspended in February 1744 and would remain suspended throughout the rebellion crisis). But at the same time – and this a theme that emerges large in her next periodical, The Parrot – she puts a spotlight on the mechanisms of selfsuppression that occur when a traumatized nation succumbs to its fears. Mr Tell-Truth and his suppressed letter set up the central theme of this number, the ubiquity of lies and lying – the ‘glaring Lye’ but also ‘all Equivocations, Evasions, or any Subterfuge by which Truth may be disguised’.103 Within this context, equivocation of any shape or complexion inevitably has a political dimension: ‘Patriot Lies, – Ministerial Lies, – Screening Lies, – Accusative Lies, – Lies to rouze the Malecontent, and Lies to beguile the honest Enquirer’.104 The entire political spectrum is comprehended: patriots and ministers, those who would expose wrongdoing in high places and those who would screen wrongdoers. In common with other Patriot pamphleteers in the 1740s, she stresses the dishonesty that flourishes in the post-Walpolean environment of corruption: so thick, pervasive, and multi-sourced are the lies that honest inquiry is baffled and truth itself lost in the murk of obfuscation created by competing misrepresentations. The failure of The Female Spectator to participate in the displays of proHanoverian feeling so conspicuous elsewhere in the press, even the formerly oppositional press, may in other words plausibly be read as oblique political commentary; a well to tell the truth but tell it slant. Those who object that ‘polite’ entertainment such as The Female Spectator professed itself to be would hardly be expected to declare for the government in the manner of a daily or even weekly paper should consider the course plotted by the Gentleman’s Magazine, the leading monthly. In September, Gentleman’s announced it would set aside its usual fare ‘in order to devote its pages to rousing “English virtue in each English heart”’.105 The Female Spectator could easily have done likewise and her disinclination to do so may suggest alienation from the temper of the nation and possibly frustration over the outpouring of support for the government in the wake of the invasion in Scotland. Clearly she regards the ‘truths’ issuing from the press as disinformation and across-the-board falsehood. A widely shared view seems to be emerging that Haywood was a Jacobite in her sympathies and perhaps principles, especially in the years following the Forty-Five. This assessment rests mainly on two works thought to exhibit clear

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Jacobite tendencies, The Parrot (1746) and A Letter from H— G—g, Esq (1749). Even those intent upon establishing Haywood’s Jacobite bona fides acknowledge that pro-Stuart sentiment is faint in the first two decades of her writing life, although Margaret Rose argues for Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1725) as a proStuart work.106 The Female Spectator is largely reticent on the Jacobite rebellion. It is referred to just once, in Book 18 (19 October 1745), and then in passing in a tight-lipped reference to a letter concerned with Jacobite plots ‘wholly improper at this Time to be inserted’.107 Earlier numbers generally scoff at the supposed Jacobite threat, as in the deflationary reference to threats of ‘Invasions—Popish Pretenders—Plots and what not’ earlier on.108 The Hanoverian Lady’s insistence upon the danger posed by France and the Pretender is mocked when the bubbly ingénue Euphrosine cannot stop laughing at the picture of the ‘galloping Progress’ of the Bourbon armies toward England. (An interesting light is thus thrown on the canons of mid-century ‘politeness’: it is acceptable to laugh at foreign women if they hail from Hanover.) The Female Spectator waxes downright sarcastic on the subject: ‘Nothing certainly could have been added to the Humour of this Raw-Head and Bloody Bones Expedition, unless the Ingenious Inventress of it had made them call at Rome in their Way, and brought the Pope and the Pretender on their Backs,’ adding derisively, ‘Bless us! What a terrible Monster is this House of Bourbon!’109 Minimizing of the danger posed by France and the exiled house of Stuart need not be evidence of Jacobite sympathy, however. It is at least as likely to comment by indirection on Carteret’s foreign policy with its unpopular emphasis on a continental land war. More telling, in my view, is the near silence of The Female Spectator on the Jacobite invasion during the crisis period from October to December 1745 (Books 18, 19, 20) when the danger to England was perceived as greatest and the rebellion was receiving saturation coverage in all sectors of the press. Read against the overwhelmingly loyalist tenor of nearly everything in circulation at a time when even heretofore staunchly oppositional papers sought to mobilize support for the Hanoverian regime and reinforce anti-Jacobite sentiment, the reticence of The Female Spectator is remarkable.110 It suggests a disaffection that will find direct expression in her next publication, The Parrot.

7 THE PARROT

Less than three months separate the final installment of The Female Spectator, dated 17 May 1746, from the appearance 2 August of the first number of Haywood’s next periodical venture, The Parrot, a weekly essay-paper that included a news section entitled ‘Compendium of the Times’. The Parrot ran for just nine issues, coming to an unceremonious close on 4 October. The reason for the abrupt halt is just one of the puzzles to be taken up in this chapter, but it seems certain that the unpopular positions taken on a number of matters of public interest played a part, as did the paper’s obvious sympathies for the recently defeated Jacobite rebels, and the fact that the invidious reflections upon the Duke of Cumberland offered in the second number smacked of seditious libel certainly did nothing to endear it to the authorities, or for that matter the intensely anti-Jacobite public. The Parrot represents a disaffected report on the state of the nation in the summer of 1746, when all eyes were turned toward the public executions of the captured Jacobite rebels and few press organs dared openly criticize the man already known as ‘the Butcher of Culloden’. The mood of the country during the brief period in which the essays appeared has been characterized by a modern political historian as loudly and even hysterically loyalist, bloodthirsty, retributive, anti-Jacobite, anti-Catholic, xenophobic, exclusionary; with only a handful of exceptions, of which The Parrot seems to have been the most outspoken, there were few papers willing to extend mercy to anyone who had fought on the losing side in the Forty-Five.1 The debate on mercy versus ‘severe’ justice was just one issue on which The Parrot came down on the humanitarian side espoused by a well-muffled minority. If The Parrot is Haywood at her most politically topical, it is also in parts a satiric masterpiece, and its parrot-speaker, a foreign-born and well-travelled ‘bird of parts’, stands as one of her richest comic creations. On one level this irrepressible prattling truth-teller stands for the oppositional press generally, which liked always to plump itself upon its steadfast adherence to Truth, as the Jacobite National Journal; or, the Country Gazette did in its opening number, for example, when the paper announced it was ‘calculated entirely for the Lovers of Truth’.2 On another, as some critics have already noticed, the parrot-speaker is a – 133 –

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stand-in for Haywood herself in many guises, from an ironically assumed position as political outsider, to a woman writer under assault from cavilling critics. On still another level, the parrot-speaker is the butt of Haywood’s mockery, the vehicle for a lively satire on the British people as parrot-like conformists incapable of thinking for themselves. Filled as it is with authorial self-inscriptions, witty social satire, edgy political commentary, and a strain of dark humanitarianism that we are only now beginning to associate with late Haywood, The Parrot is another of those understudied texts ripe for exploration. Its relative brevity and easy accessibility within a single volume of Selected Works make it a good candidate for the kind of intensive scrutiny received by the amatory fiction of the 1720s. It has the added benefit of giving us further glimpses of the inventive ad hoc feminism that seems a central feature of Haywood’s political journalism.

‘by the Authors of the Female Spectator’ Once the likelihood is established that Haywood’s political journalism was to some degree the product of outside interests, whether political or commercial – that is, whether prompted by the interests of political patrons with views in want of dissemination or by the calculations of a bookseller with an eye toward profit – the question of authorial motivation becomes more complex. Put simply, to what extent was The Parrot a vehicle for expressing Haywood’s own political beliefs and to what extent was it a platform for the views of others? Did the voluble parrotspeaker serve as a comically distanced mouthpiece enabling Haywood to register some of her own dismay over the intolerant mood of the country, as would seem to be the case? Did the weekly paper represent an oblique means of self-expression distantly akin to the more unabashedly self-expressive role of blogging in our own moment? Or was Haywood basically writing to order, in the manner of most other political journalists at mid-century? Blouch, who edited The Parrot for the Selected Works, is surely right to observe that the periodical is important for the ‘light it sheds on Haywood’s political views’, and justified as well in her speculation that these views ‘may in turn have helped doom’ the venture.3 But it must be admitted that much remains obscure about the venture, including the extent to which it may have been undertaken with political backing. Haywood’s attitudes toward the materials taken up in The Parrot are partly suggested by themes developed in the closing number of The Female Spectator. There she lays emphatic claim to her product line, threatening public exposure to anyone with a mind to publish under the name of the ‘Authors of the Female Spectator’.4 The link between the two periodicals is emphasized in the light sprinkling of pre-publication publicity, in which the new weekly is heralded as ‘By the Authors of the Female Spectator’.5 As Spedding has observed, the very look of the title page of the The Parrot, with its ‘distinctive ornaments’, was part of a calculated

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effort to ‘carry’ readers over to the new paper, although the difference in price and format indicates that the papers, one a shilling monthly and the other a four-pence weekly, circulated through somewhat different markets.6 As for subject matter, Haywood seems to have been revolving thoughts about the shape and direction of The Parrot even as she was bringing the final book of The Female Spectator to a close. Speaking through her Female Spectator persona she confesses to a ‘kind of hankering Inclination to assume another [shape] in a short time’ and hopes her readers ‘will not withdraw their favour from the Authors, in whatever Character we shall next appear’.7 The conceit of the garrulous male parrot may have already occurred to her, for this final number looks forward to one of The Parrot’s leading themes. The opening sentence announced: People nowadays seldom ‘give themselves the Trouble to examine more nearly into the Nature of Things; especially of such as they have every Day in their Mouths.’8 It is one of Haywood’s central preoccupations in the 40s and 50s – this disconnect between mind and mouth, this exasperating English propensity to parrot rather than think – and it is explored front and centre in The Parrot by way of a (would-be) irrepressible avian eidolon who stands far and away the ‘mouthiest’ character she will ever assume. The contemporary impact of The Parrot is not easily measured. It was not extracted in Gentleman’s Magazine and appears to have attracted little or no notice in the papers. The only known reference is from the 1752 journal Have at You All; or, The Drury-Lane Journal written by Bonnell Thornton where it is said to exemplify ‘the Learning of the present Age’, an odd description one might think, and Haywood herself seems never to have commented directly on the periodical.9 Readership, size of print run, and likely circulation are unknown, although we do know that Gentleman’s Magazine placed it in the ‘Poetry and Entertainment’ section of its monthly listings, and we might speculate that the four-pence price would make it accessible to a fairly wide audience. Although the periodical failed after just nine numbers, it is not hard to see why a lively oppositional paper would have seemed at the outset a commercially viable undertaking. The London reading public had been riveted by the crisis playing out in the north – one paper asserted that ‘no Body at present reads any thing but News-Papers’ – and The Parrot was one of several papers that sprang up in the crisis of 1745–6 to cater to the strong demand for news of the invasion and its repression.10 One, already mentioned, was the crypto-Jacobite National Review, launched on 22 March 1746 and suppressed by 12 June, when an openly Jacobite letter printed two days earlier on the anniversary of the birthday of James III, the Old Pretender, got its editor and printer George Gordon ushered into custody.11 Another, interestingly, was Corbett’s Whitehall Evening Post, established in March 1746, the paper that would be closely linked with Haywood until her death and beyond. Evidence from August indicates that the association between Haywood’s work and Whitehall Evening Post was already in place.12

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Another paper deserving investigation in relation to The Parrot is Fielding’s The True Patriot, a strongly ministerial weekly that ran from 5 November 1745, when the Jacobite alarm was at its height, to the following June when the rebellion was assuredly defeated. Haywood may mockingly invoke Fielding in issue No. 9 when she has her avian speaker declare himself a ‘true-born Parrot’.13 On the other hand she may have been indulging in a common play on words: ‘Penelope Prattle’ in an earlier Parrot (1728) joked that ‘Modern Patriots and Parrots are the same thing in the Greek’.14 In any case, the relationship between the two papers is intriguing. The True Patriot, as Fielding explained in the final number, dated 17 June 1746, by way of justifying some of the paper’s more inflammatory passages, had ‘exerted Vehemence against the Enemy’ at a time when the Jacobite rebels posed the greatest danger to the nation. In Downie’s assessment, the anti-Jacobite vehemence was part of a two-pronged effort first to consolidate the ruling class around the present Pelham ministry by employing standard journalistic scare tactics and then, more subtly, to reclaim a heretofore opposition-tinged ‘patriotism’ for the government. The calculated admission on Fielding’s part that ‘this word Patriot hath of late Years been very scandalously abused by some Persons’ serves to prepare the way for definition of true patriotism as ‘simply “the love of one’s Country carried into Action”’ – a conception that strips patriotism of its antiministerial and anti-corruption associations.15 The sympathy for the defeated rebels expressed in the strongly dissident The Parrot, along with its critical anatomizing of fear and hatred of Jacobites – indeed, fear of all those designated ‘other’ – places Haywood’s paper in direct opposition to Fielding’s. Newspaper historians tell us that papers were established chiefly for two reasons at this time: first, because they were likely to sell and make a profit for their owner/shareholders and, second, because they provided well-heeled sponsors with a political agenda a vehicle for their views. In the case of The Parrot it seems possible that Gardner, by now her established publisher, may have sensed an untapped market for quasi-Jacobite fare, particularly after the short-lived triweekly launched by George Gordon, National Journal, was shut down in June. Gardner may have had a particular interest in Jacobite matters. Niall MacKenzie has pointed out that during the time he was publishing The Parrot, Gardner brought out lives of the three rebel Scottish peers, two of whom were executed in August.16 By mid-summer, when the danger had passed, reliably anti-ministerial journals were back to their old ways, grumbling about degeneracy and affronts to liberty and extraordinary taxes the likes of which are unknown to a free people, but they did not direct a great deal of sympathetic attention towards the difficulties faced by the Jacobites and their families. The Parrot was not entirely alone in its Jacobite sympathies and was joined on occasion by the reliably oppositional The Craftsman, London Evening Post and Westminster Review, or, the New Weekly Miscellany, but the more typical response is that found in the declaration

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of the General Evening Post for 22 July that pity ‘to the rebels now under the censure of the law, that they may be objects of mercy, is the cry of those, and only those, who wish well to the rebels.’17 Even among oppositional papers, The Parrot was unusual in the intensity of its focus on a number of disturbing social and economic themes, among them miscarriages of justice, the brutalizing effects of public executions, abuses of power in the British colonies, misinformation and misrepresentation in the age of press-driven public opinion, threats to liberties of the press, and the power of self-censorship.18 If The Parrot was initiated by the bookseller Gardner it would make sense for him to commission Haywood to take on the role of editor. She was a lively writer as well as a thoroughgoing professional who was accustomed to working to deadline, and she had demonstrated in The Female Spectator her ability to attract the ‘very crowded Audience’ upon which, as the opening sentence of The Parrot would have it, the ‘Publisher flatters himself ’.19 Alternatively, if The Parrot was commissioned by a politician or group of politicians with a cause or point of view in need of an outlet, an anti-Cumberland faction for example, they might have seen Haywood as an effective polemicist for their cause. Her widely acknowledged gift for eliciting sympathy would make her a natural choice for parties seeking to foster a more favourable climate of opinion for the Jacobite prisoners, for example. A host of other motives are possible, of course, and the fact that Haywood possessed unmistakeable Jacobite sympathies should not be left out of consideration. Finally, as will be seen later in this chapter, there is some indication that Haywood and Gardner were still in some way aligned with ‘Jeffrey Broadbottom’ and other personnel at the Old England Journal.

A Bird of Parts Haywood creates for these essays one of her most memorable editorial personae, a cosmopolitan ‘bird of parts’, green-feathered, East Indian by birth, who has resided in many nations, acquired many languages and conversed with people of all degrees. In England alone he has lived with ‘fifty-five Families of vastly different Ranks and Dispositions’, picking up wit, gallantry, learning and a wide range of un-English sympathies along the way.20 He is one of her more amusing comic inventions, this polyglot bird with a flair for ‘Universal Chit-Chat’, a ‘Tale-telling Inclination’, an overly developed ‘communicative Faculty’ and an ‘insatiable Itch of talking’.21 The opening sentence offers a good sample of his high-spirited colloquial address: ‘Well, I am got upon my swing,--the Town are gathering thick about me, and I have Liberty to prate (as my Publisher flatters himself ) to a very crowded Audience.’22 His prattling is often the vehicle of lighthearted mockery, as in the send-up in No. 2 of English pride of birth:

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A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood I am a Parrot;--my Father, Grandsire, great Grandsire, and so back for near six thousand Years, were all Parrots; and if Antiquity be looked upon as a necessary Qualification for a great Name, it is easy to make appear, even from your own Chronology, that our Race was prior to Adam, the first Man.23

He is also the perfect ‘outsider’ commentator in whose faux-innocent prattling the people of England are revealed to be blind, bigoted, intolerant, credulous and above all unthinking human-parrots who mimic mindlessly the words of their presumed superiors, who are mindless parrots themselves. In addition, the parrot-speaker’s perch on a swing and, by implication, within a cage, may hint at the darker themes of the periodical, in particular the ironies inherent in the parrot’s precarious ‘Liberty to prate’. In short, there is much that is serious in the bird’s volubility. By virtue of his cosmopolitan background he is keenly sensitive to his adopted country’s xenophobic propensities, its fear and hatred of foreignness and need to exclude ‘un-English’ elements – including at this time the ‘barbaric’ Highlanders, and he thus stands at considerable distance from the self-congratulatory irrationalities of a ‘certain Nation’ where five or six leading persons are able to impose ‘the most gross and palpable Absurdities’ upon the ‘infatuated Crowd’.24 His faux-naïve truth-telling expresses a motif common to oppositional literature, which never tired of exposing the lies and enchantments of whatever ministry happened to be in power. It is not hard to imagine that the parrot persona speaks also for Haywood. Certainly her political writings repeatedly express frustration with an easily manipulated English public, and he may be voicing her own distaste for her country’s tolerance, even celebration, of the massacres and reign of terror visited on the Jacobite rebels, many of them Scottish ‘foreigners’. Recent criticism has called attention to ways that the alien parrot might speak for Haywood in relation to exclusions she experienced as a woman writer. One critic has noticed, for example, that the parrot’s complaints in No. 1, about critics who ‘cavil at my Stile, my Manner, perhaps hunt out a verb misplaced … and cry shame on my ill Rhetoric’, appear to express the irritation of ‘a woman author tired of being dismissed as the parrot she sarcastically, perhaps for the sake of argument, pretends to be’.25 The self-mocking voice of this lone prattler may express something of Haywood’s ambivalent attitude toward the ‘crowd’ that gathers to hear the bird-on-its-swing, a public at once admiring and hostile, as when he reports in No. 2 that appearing in public means becoming ‘the Butt of a thousand Shafts’.26 Some may hear Haywood in the parrot-speaker’s warning that his audience not mistake him for a ‘meer Parrot’ who is no more than ‘the Eccho of every foolish Rumour’.27And some may want to connect the ironic confession of a ‘Tale-telling Inclination’ in No. 1 with Haywood’s continuing identification with the genre that gained her such notoriety in the 1720s, the secret history. The parrot defends his habit of uninhibited ‘tale-telling’ of dis-

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coveries gleaned through ‘the Bars of a Window, or the Key-hole of a Door’ on the grounds that his disclosures have preserved ‘many a Husband’s Honour, a Virgin’s Chastity, and a whole Family’s Disgrace’, and the whole can be read as a jocular but not wholly unserious rationale for the ‘truth-telling’ aims of the secret histories and scandal chronicles for which she had been such an innovative force earlier on.28 We might recall from Memoirs of a Certain Island the revelations of wrongdoing on the part of socially well-placed people, men usually, whose evil deeds fall outside the bounds of the law and are therefore punishable only through ‘the Shame of Discovery’ executed by the narrator. The Parrot is rich with material for the study of Haywood’s self-inscriptions, and readers interested in Haywood’s self-representational strategies will find in the worldly parrot-with-an-itch-to-talk a surrogate on many levels for the author. The Parrot is also a telling source for study of Haywood’s social criticism, which goes beyond standard oppositional laments about the credulity of an enchanted populace to exhibit tonal complexities more readily associated with imaginative satire than with polemical journalism. ‘Parroting’ is a multidimensioned phenomenon that takes on a range of social, cultural, and political meanings that shift from essay to essay, and even within essays, as Haywood’s purposes shift from light-hearted mischief to dark satire. In the more purely comic moments the parrot’s ‘blabbing’, his ‘Tale-telling Inclination’ to turn everything into ‘universal Chit Chat’ amounts to little more than prattling gossip.29 But in darker moments the prattle serves to expose the insularity and bigotry of the national character and to reveal the people of England to be narrow-minded, unthinking, suspicious and cruel. The English tend toward fear of foreigners and indeed anything strange: they are strangely lacking in compassion and, it is piquantly ironic coming from a parrot, they lack ‘Fellow-feeling of the Miseries of those of the same Species with ourselves’.30 They are unthinking conformists – ‘few, very few of them, either think or judge for themselves’.31 A letter from Amicus Veritas in No. 9 makes a similar point: human parrots are prey to the ‘false and ridiculous Rumours of Coffee House Politicians’ and ‘lying Legends which issue from the Press’; in the ‘strange Credulity which has, of late Years, possessed the People of these Kingdoms’, they ‘swallow the most gross Absurdities’ and reject the ‘most glaring Truths’.32 And they are cruel. ‘They say,’ he rattles on with mock-innocence, that your ‘sanguinary Disposition’ is discoverable ‘even in your most elegant Diversions’ – a reference to the bloodthirsty tastes of London theatregoers.33‘There is a Nation in the World, I won’t say the English,’ given over to ‘blind Bigottry’ as well as ‘slavish Dependence on the Breath of others’ – the latter an apt metaphor for the propensity to substitute the mechanical repetition of opinion for the exercise of reason and judgment.34 The satire on the national character extends to indictment of those in positions of power and influence – in government, theatre, law, medicine, the clergy – who are essentially ‘loud-voiced

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Parrots’ themselves, creatures ‘just capable of attaining so much of Speech as to give a Sort of Articulation to whatever he hears, without the least Sentiment of his own.’35 In Haywood’s satiric vision it is the people of England who are the real parrots who, for reasons modish or mercenary, merely mimic the words of their superiors. The derivative speech of ‘the Human Parrots’ comes off badly in comparison with the more thoughtful utterances of the parrot-speaker, who not only speaks freely but seeks to speak his own mind.36

Killing Flies for Sport The second number of The Parrot, published on 9 August, contains sharp and one might have thought risky reflections on the rebellion’s suppressor. The satire on the ‘universally beloved’ Oram, transparently William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, is all the more striking read in relation to the enthusiastic displays that greeted his return to London from the mopping up operation in the Highlands and the wildly adulatory treatment he was receiving in the popular press. In The True Patriot, No. 33, 17 June, the farewell number, Fielding’s editorial persona declares his job finished now that the rebellion has been ‘brought to a happy Conclusion by the victorious Arms of his Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland’.37 The pro-Cumberland General Advertiser on 31 July hailed him as an ‘amazing young Hero’ who ‘incessantly toils for the Publick Good!’38 The Parrot began publication on 2 August, just a week after the amazing hero made his triumphant return to London on 25 July, where he was greeted by adoring crowds, bell-ringings, bonfires, illuminations, and massive demonstrations.39 Despite mutterings about ‘the butcher’s’ cruel treatment of the defeated rebels and his practice of what today would be called state-sponsored terrorism, Cumberland’s reputation was at its height, and one certainly gets the impression that the author behind the parrot persona was anything but pleased by the ‘nearuniversal acclamation of the Hanoverian dynasty for the first time as “deliverers” themselves’.40 Her attack on Oram may have been commissioned or personally motivated, but in either case it seems to tap into strong personal feeling. The attack on Oram is skilfully managed. The massacre and brutal clearances of the Jacobite rebels in the Highlands are recast into a satirically allegorized scene of a carnage in which the sadistic Oram kills flies for sport one hot afternoon, as prelude to a visit to a courtesan. (The linkage between casual violence and casual sex is intriguing.) The entire scene is witnessed by the no longer jaunty parrot. Oram dismembers the insolent flies, first attracting them with a lump of sugar and then systematically ‘pulling off the Legs of some, the Wings of others, and the Heads of the largest’. The reference to the ‘Heads of the largest’ points toward the imminent execution by beheading of the Scottish Lords Balmerino and Kilmarnock at Tower Hill, which will be reported in The Parrot No. 4, dated

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23 August.41 The diversion gives sadistic delight: he ‘laughed very heartily to see the severed Limbs and mangled Carcasses lye spread upon the Field of Action’, alluding to the infamous killing fields around Culloden where nearly 3000 Jacobite troops had been hacked to death by Cumberland’s forces.42 But why, the bemused parrot wonders, did Oram feel obliged to torture as well as kill the flies? He answers his own question with reference to what historians agree was a deliberate policy of preventative terror in the Highlands: ‘I remembred how numerous a Race they were, and that the Sun was continually raising them fresh Recruits, I judged he did this by way of Terrorem to the rest’ – the argument for calculated severity was frequently advanced in the pro-government press – ‘who, seeing the Fate of their Brothers, would bend their Flight another Way, and no more molest a Place sacred to Love and Oram’.43 On the most immediate level a satire on the cruelty of the Cumberland’s Highland policies, the scene also plays out concerns about issues of free speech and the liberty of the press that were broadly shared in a period in which the strands of politics, press, and public opinion were becoming increasingly enmeshed. As the scene progresses, some of the ironies begin to turn against the parrot-speaker who professes himself baffled to square Oram’s reputation for ‘Compassion, Generosity, and every humane Virtue’ with conduct that, he deadpans, ‘appeared to me at first to have somewhat in it of Cruelty’.44 Next, the parrot seeks to twist his perceptions in an effort to bring the evidence of his own eyes into conformity with public opinion. His ‘supposition’ of cruelty must be ‘premature’. These insect ‘Wretches’ surely deserved their fate. It must be Oram’s ‘great Wisdom’ to know that the seeming cruelty of divesting them of their limbs is kindness, actually. This demonstration of bad reasoning crescendoes in the concluding thought that because the flies now lack the means of flight they are no longer ‘vexatious to those of a superior Species’ and are thus preserved from exposure to ‘continual Hazards of the Death they now sustained’: in death they are spared the disagreeable prospect of having to die.45 The implication is that it requires just such flights of unreason to sustain an heroic image of Cumberland in the face of plain truth. Earlier that year, in The True Patriot No. 17 for 25 February, Fielding had extolled the ‘glorious Son’ who had delivered safety and security to the nation by ‘the very Terror of his Name’.46 It is a measure of the political distance that had opened between the erstwhile political allies that Fielding’s glorious national hero would be Haywood’s mangler of flies. The Oram episode also exposes the chilling effects of state power on the ‘Liberty to prate’ proclaimed by the parrot-speaker at the periodical’s opening. The same parrot-speaker who had declared in the first number that nothing could repress his ‘insatiable Itch of talking’ finds himself unable to speak in Oram’s presence. He watches the insect massacre in silence, dreading to incur a ‘Displeasure … no less fatal to me’.47 A similar dynamic occurs in a letter from Amicus

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Veritas printed in the final number.48 This Friend to Truth complains that English public life is dominated by the prattle of ‘popular and loud-voiced Parrots’ in parliament, playhouses, law, medicine, and religion. They are tools, ‘meer Machines’ that advance the designs of others by manipulating a public consisting of human-parrots too intellectually indolent to think for themselves or form their own judgments. This collective echolalia is thus linked with the wholesale consumption of lies and fictions which is in turn linked with the ‘strange Credulity which has, of late Years, possessed the People of these Kingdoms’. The praise of the parrot species for their ‘free speaking, and being no Respector of Persons’ that follows takes on ironic overtones when the reader recalls the parrot’s own abject silence in the face of Oram’s campaign ad terrorem, and the ironies deepen when even Amicus Veritas must shut down his own truth-telling, saying simply that the present subject is ‘too touching and too delicate for the present Times’.49 Like the self-silencing Parrot in the presence of authority, Amicus Veritas apprehends government reprisals – or is it the coercive authority of public opinion that he fears? In any event, he will ‘smother’ all ‘Inclination to communicate’. Like her contemporaries, Haywood celebrated liberty of speech as fundamental to the freedom-loving British spirit. But as the Oram episode demonstrates, she was acutely aware of the paradoxical nature of the human response to power that is projected in the parrot’s wanting to talk back but also feeling disabled, and thus oscillating between defiance and paralysis.

Hangings, Mercy and Justice Another aspect of contemporary life addressed in The Parrot is the debate over the proper punishment of the defeated Jacobites. The trials and executions of the three Scottish peers – Balmerino, Cromarty, and Kilmarnock – and the nine rebels executed at Kennington Common, members of the Manchester regiment captured at Carlisle, excited considerable interest throughout the summer of 1746. The London public was almost united in its opposition to lenity on the oft-asserted grounds that merciful treatment of the Jacobite rebels would breed further rebellion. It was generally agreed that crushing reprisals were needed. The Parrot No. 4, of 23 August, opens with an expression of dismay over the bloodyminded popular mood: ‘Poor Poll is very melancholy,--all the Conversation I have heard for I know not how long, has been wholly on Indictments,--Trials,-Sentences of Death, and Executions:--Disagreeable Entertainment to a Bird of any Wit or Spirit!’50 But Poll speaks a minority view. The prevailing sentiment in the press was support for the policy of ‘rigid justice’ enunciated by C. D. in a letter, dated 9 August, to the Daily Advertiser: it is the ‘zealous desire of this nation, that his majesty will give proof of that virtue which warms his royal breast’ by the exercise of ‘such rigid justice in a paternal care of his people, as will make him the glory of this, and admiration of succeeding ages.’51 Another letter from the Daily

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Advertiser argues for ‘exemplary rigour’ and the ‘greatest severity’ in the punishment of the rebels: anything less will serve to ‘expose us to more danger than we have yet surmounted’. Jacobites are ‘incorrigible’, ‘the most evil, irreclaimable spirits’; the security of the state requires relentless suppression.52 The Parrot, in sharp contrast, called for mercy, that ‘darling attribute of Heaven’, and sought to enlist support for George II’s unpopular decision to pardon most of the convicted rebels. (The case for mercy was also made in The Craftsman.) The Parrot urged commendation of the ‘truly Royal Clemency’ that will endear the king to all good and faithful subjects and ‘turn the Voice of Faction into Admiration’.53 But The Parrot was going against the tide. Horace Walpole reported that ‘the city and the generality are very angry that so many rebels have been pardoned’.54 To build support for clemency, Haywood uses a familiar tactic of smearing opponents of the policy with imputations of indigence, mercenary interest, and ‘littleness’ – a term meant to convey social inferiority. The Parrot asserts its own connection with the ‘noble and genteel Part of the Town’ and seeks to range itself against ‘your little Authors’, the hired guns, political journalists paid by the newspaper proprietors to ‘influence the low and unthinking Part of their Readers’.55 Haywood uses similar tactics to develop a case against public executions, described by the humanitarian parrot-speaker as ‘Spectacles of Horror’, ‘mournful Occasions’ and ‘dreadful sights’, and she draws upon a high church Toryism that surfaces as well in the final books of The Female Spectator and will become increasingly important in the last decade of her writing life to argue for the debasing and irreligious effect of executions upon spectators. Time spent ‘gaping’ at the ‘Wretches’ might be better passed in ‘Hours in Prayers for their immortal Welfare’, and the word gape carries interesting political associations in Haywood. To gape is to listen with your mouth rather than your mind, and thus to be vulnerable to lies and impositions.56 She also draws upon the nascent discourse of sensibility, as when the Parrot urges pity for the suffering of ‘their Kindreds’ – the ‘living Relatives of those unhappy Persons, who, though innocent, must suffer in their Kindreds Fate’.57 Rushing off to an execution reveals selfishness, religious insensibility and unjustifiable curiosity. These points are reinforced later in the same number in the anecdote of the son who, driven by insatiable curiosity, goes mad as a result of witnessing his own father’s execution for sheep-stealing. (‘How dreadful,’ we are told, ‘was the Consequence that attended this Man’s unhappy Propensity, to make one among the Crowd at such Spectacles!’)58 Haywood seems to be issuing a call for a more compassionate social order grounded in a conservative ideology of high-church Anglicanism: ‘The meanest and most common Malefactors, who are condemned every Sessions, are yet your FellowCreatures, have the same share in Futurity with yourselves, and that Depravity of Human Nature which has brought them to so sad an End, should, methinks, rather excite in you Emotions of Shame and Sorrow.’59 The argument for fellowfeeling, progressive in some ways, is deeply conservative in its Anglicanism and

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its class-based assumptions about taste. To take pleasure in a hanging is what you would expect of ‘low people’. Among people of a higher sort who boast ‘a superior Knowledge of Things’, the attractions of a public execution bespeak ‘a Taste miserably depraved’ suggestive of a lapse of reason: people who attend executions ‘either did not think at all, or thought to very bad Purpose’.60 Robert W. Jones’s discussion of the discourse of taste in The Female Spectator is useful in this connection. He argues convincingly that the concept of ‘taste’, an acquired and self-regulating capacity for polite discernment, enabled Haywood to imagine and address an audience of women who can be ‘trusted to discriminate accurately and to act and think prudently’. The capacity to distinguish tasteful conduct from conduct that is luxuriant, vulgar, or foolish – or in the case of executions, irreligious and depraved – entitles women to take part in public debates on the most pressing issues of the day.61 This analysis helps us see more clearly her strategic conflation of curious spectatorship with social inferiority in The Parrot. Women, and men as well in this instance, who make a holiday of executions are possessed of the worst possible taste; they are governed not by compassion, fellow-feeling, and religious sentiment but by sensation and vulgar curiosity. (On this point Haywood and Fielding agree. In 1748 in Jacobite’s Journal he writes: ‘The Vulgar are eager after Scandal, from the same Curiosity that makes them flock to Executions.’)62 The ‘foolish and unjustifiable Curiosity’ that impels them testifies to their inferior origins: it is ‘low People’ who seek to be entertained by ‘these mournful Occasions’; ‘better cannot be expected from their Education and way of Life’; to be a ‘willing Spectator’ of another’s death in public argues a callous selfishness that one ‘ought … to be ashamed of testifying’.63 The argument against public executions is buttressed, in other words, by a class-inflected social analysis that conflates curiosity with an inferior social position on one hand and on the other aligns distaste for executions with superior discernment and discrimination. Although rooted in social conservativism, this treatment places Haywood in the forefront of the humanitarian revulsion against capital punishment that would gather momentum over the course of the second half of the century. The Parrot combines the use of a humorously conceived satiric persona with new emphasis on the ties of sympathy binding all human beings to expose a wholesale failure of pity, sympathy, compassion, and fellow-feeling on the part of the English.

A Compendium of the Times The Compendium of the Times found at the end of most numbers of The Parrot is a collection of short news items strung together in narrative fashion that recalls in some ways the tradition of the handwritten newsletter to a friend in the country that dates from the early part of the seventeenth century, but here of course

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the newsletter is given print form. It is usually said to do little more than repeat or ‘parrot’ items in general circulation, but in fact much of its content is idiosyncratically Haywood. The male compendium-writer, a Londoner and self-described loyal subject, embodies a self-consciously sceptical relationship to the ‘news’, and in deliberate contrast to the credulous public repeatedly mocked by the Parrot, he is properly distrustful of the ‘Intelligences’ he collects and sends: they will sometimes ‘be at Variance with each other, and frequently with Probability’.64 The political views expressed or implied by the Compendium-writer, who enlists himself among ‘all true Lovers of their Country’, often take a Tory-Jacobite line. Many entries recur with amusement to the reported movements of that willof-the-wisp, the young Pretender, ‘incredible’ as they appear: ‘What can give Rise to such Stories, or what Turn they can possibly answer, I must own is beyond my Comprehension’ (No. 4); accounts of the Pretender ‘are no less mysterious than his own Behaviour’ (No. 9).65 Some poke fun at items in the press and figures in the government. No. 2 reports that the papers recorded ‘as an Article of Moment’ that the Duke of Cumberland took tea with the Earl and Countess of Lincoln in Downing Street, but this bit of society trivia is followed by the ironically understated intelligence that Habeas Corpus would be suspended for a third time for another six months.66 Some entries seem to be interventions in public debates. He supports the unpopular royal pardon of the condemned Jacobites, this ‘Act of Goodness in the King’, and represents the widespread opposition to mercy as an irrational lapse on the part of the usually compassionate ‘common People’ misled by propaganda in ‘several News-Papers’ (No. 3).67 Of special interest to feminist scholars is material that seeks to ‘create a space’, as we might say, for women and their experiences. Sometimes this takes the form of remarks on women positioned on the edges of public events – quirky, oddly humorous items: a female member of the crowd watching the Jacobite Lords on their way to trial is carried home ill to be ‘delivered of a fine Boy, fathered by Nobody’; a man in the same crowd ‘lost his Wife’ and ‘has not been able to find her since’ (No. 1).68 Such items often have a satiric edge. The death of Lord Kilmarnock had such an effect on ‘a certain English Lady of Quality’ that it is feared she ‘will never touch a Card again’ (No. 4).69 It is hard not to suspect Haywood’s hand in these ironic, throwaway moments. (Typically, ‘news’ was gathered and compiled by someone employed by the printer, but of course the specific arrangements with respect to The Parrot are unknown.) The most interesting and by far the most developed item in the Compendium is the heartbreaking story of the fiancée of the executed Jacobite prisoner James Dawson that comes at the end of No. 1. This romantic account, which is squeezed into the final page in tiny print, appears to be a late insertion. Its consistency with Haywood’s known habits of mind and favoured writing conventions suggests the strong likelihood that she wrote it herself. In contrast to the presumption of

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unreliability that obtains elsewhere in the Compendium, the story of Dawson’s fiancée comes with an imprimatur: ‘the Truth of it may be depended upon’.70 It is proffered as an illustration of female constancy, a ‘remarkable, though melancholly Proof, that Constancy and Tenderness have not altogether forsook the Bosom of the Fair’.71 In point of fact, the romantic story contains not a scrap of historical truth: nowhere else in the surviving press coverage is this purported fiancée so much as mentioned. Study of this invented account affords a good example of Haywood’s practice of a proto-tabloid form of journalism that deliberately blends fact and fiction in an effort to convey a different kind of truth that ‘may be depended upon’, in this case the truth of women’s capacity for heroic love.

Dawson’s Fiancée James Dawson was one of the nine Jacobite officers taken at Carlisle and hung at Kennington Common on Wednesday, 30 July 1746. The trials and executions of these officers received extensive coverage in the press, the opposition press especially, and occasioned at least two pamphlets, the anonymous A Genuine Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Dying Words and another written apparently by Ralph Griffiths, Authentic Copies of the Letters and Other Papers Delivered, at their Execution. Given Dawson’s background as a Cambridge-educated gentleman of ‘very reputable family’, as the Gentleman’s Magazine account had it, it is probably inevitable that he would figure with a certain élan in many print accounts, but even in an age disinclined to pursue the rigours of historical veracity it is startling to see the extent to which his Jacobite exploits lent themselves to vastly divergent fabrications.72 In Authentic Copies, he is imagined by Griffiths as an unsavoury figure, a ne’er-do-well suspected of murder and expelled from the university who is turned out of the house by a father ‘provoked’ by his ‘evil courses’. This Dawson does not die cheerfully: ‘God only knows what I suffer, when I reflect on the Terrors of my approaching dreadful End’.73 In other accounts, however, Dawson is young, heedless and merry, and the father, instead of the justly incensed figure of Griffith’s admonitory account, is a heartbroken man who is given a wrenching farewell scene with his son. In the Genuine Account, the father’s ‘unutterable’ sorrow is marked by tears, sighs, and broken expressions that bring tears to the eyes of all observers, and ‘when they parted, how did his Passions struggle in his paternal Breast!—But it easier to imagine, than with Words to describe this moving Scene.’74 The language is surprisingly akin to that in Haywood’s novels, it is interesting to note. When Haywood undertakes to retell the story of Dawson’s death for lastminute insertion in The Parrot, it is transformed into a feminocentric tragic romance. She omits the father-son relation central to the other accounts to con-

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centrate instead on the heroically steadfast if entirely fictitious fiancée, whose invented actions are placed front and centre. She is given a romance pedigree – a good family, handsome fortune, and abundant love from Dawson – and an aching detail: they were to have married on the day of his release from prison. Dawson in her version is dispatched in a few words, and the pathos of the fatherson parting replaced by an inspiring demonstration of exemplary constancy on the part of the fiancée. Her heroic response to his death is detailed over five paragraphs. Absent are most of the particulars found in sympathetic accounts in such leading oppositional papers as Westminster Journal and London Evening Post, where the genteelly dressed prisoners conduct themselves with resolution and piety, the solemn spectators are vast in number, and the Jacobite cause is just. The one detail that is found in all accounts, the consignment of the heart and entrails of the executed into a fire, is given a macabre turn when Haywood describes the fiancée as ‘near enough to see the Fire kindled, which was to consume that Heart she knew so much devoted to her.’75 It is a grisly and very Haywoodian literalizing of the romance metaphor of the heart that burns for love. The crowd, the dignified behaviour of the condemned, their calm piety, the dreadful details of their execution: these standard details are left out of Haywood’s account. What compels her attention and is presented to the reader for approbation is the spectacle of the supreme self-command of the fiancée as she watches from a coach. She is pointedly described as displaying none of ‘those Extravagancies her friends had apprehended’. Her exemplary steadiness might usefully be contrasted with the loving frenzy of Fielding’s Mrs Heartfree in the prison scene in Book 4 of Jonathan Wild when, thinking she is taking final leave of her husband, she runs to him ‘with a Look all wild, staring, and frantic, and, having reached his Arms, fainted away in them without uttering a Syllable.’76 Female constancy in Fielding’s rendering expresses itself in loss of self-control that contrasts strikingly with the self-control of Dawson’s fiancée. But the latter comes at a price: she expires when ‘all was over’, overcome by the excess of grief that the force of her resolution had kept ‘smothered within her Breast’.77 It is fascinating to find that this scene is reiterated in various forms in a number of Haywood’s works, most strikingly in the Tower Hill execution scene in Memoirs of a Certain Island (1724) where Mira (the Countess of Derwentwater) takes leave of her soon-to-be-beheaded husband, Count Deleau ( James Radcliffe, the Earl of Derwentwater) ‘with an unparallel’d Courage’ and dies not long thereafter, exhibiting ‘a Constancy’ of which ‘there are too few Examples’, a typically romanticized retelling with little basis in fact.78 A similar scene of heroic constancy in the face of an execution of a male beloved is found in the Madam d’ Ensilden episode in The Fortunate Foundlings (1744).79 Should The Parrot be designated a ‘Jacobite periodical’, as some believe?80 A careful critic who has reconstructed the parrot tradition in periodical litera-

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ture terms it ‘cautiously pro-Jacobite’ and another finds that The Parrot allowed Haywood to express opaque but apparently unqualified support for a Stuart restoration.81 There is certainly much to support a Jacobite reading. The Parrot essays are keenly attuned to the sufferings of the defeated Jacobites, giving sympathetic attention to rebel prisoners and eliciting compassion for their families. An early number includes a mordant representation of the Duke of Cumberland, the ‘universally beloved Oram’, as casual sadist. The cosmopolitan parrot-speaker is an alien many times over, stigmatized by species, green colouration, and Javaborn foreign origin, and thus an apt comic mouthpiece for a satire on the narrow insularity and easily inflamed xenophobia of the British, as well as an expression of distaste for English prejudice and even, in one reading, ‘a subversive (though somewhat camouflaged) agent of both antiracism and antislavery’.82 His verdant plumage is said to have called forth Jacobite associations, green being associated with the fabled Stuart oak.83 The satire on British insularity conveyed by his baffled response to what today we would call racism is often quoted: ‘some People will have it that a Negro might as well set up for a Beauty, as a green Parrot for a good Speaker;--Preposterous Assertion! as if the Complection of the Body had any Influence over the Faculties of the Mind.’84 The parrot-speaker seems to have provided the Jacobite-leaning author with an almost irresistible channel for registering the distress experienced by outsiders and underliers, the poor and the powerless, Jacobite sympathizers among them, as news poured in of the ferocious mopping up operations in the Highlands, followed in August by eager press accounts of Londoners flocking to see executions of captured Jacobites during a bloodthirsty year that saw some 120 Jacobite public executions.85 Nonetheless, I am not prepared to call The Parrot a Jacobite periodical, at least not without a host of qualifiers. Certainly, it throws the weight of its persuasions behind the forces antagonistic to the ministry, especially the faction associated with the Duke of Cumberland. It endorses Jacobite virtues, especially that of heroic constancy. But there is no indication of subscription to Jacobite political principles, including the notion that kingship is God-given and indefeasible, nor is there any pro-Stuart rhetoric that I can detect – no call for a return to rightful monarchy, no hints at the desirability of a restoration or interest in dynastic claims. In addition, it is worth noting that contemporary observers hostile to and thus alert to signs of the Jacobite menace, Henry Fielding for example, fail to detect the stirrings of a new round of Jacobite activity until more than a year later. (In the final number of Jacobite’s Journal Fielding would date the emergence of a ‘Strange Spirit of Jacobitism’ to ‘the latter End of the Year 1747’.)86 Although broadly sympathetic to the Jacobite prisoners, The Parrot is tempered with a critical attitude that would seem to go beyond the need to disarm imputations of sedition. The Scottish peers awaiting execution in the Tower show a ‘strange uncertainty of Mind’ and ‘Irresolution’ unworthy of them.87 Measured against the constancy exampled by Dawson’s fiancée, they

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are found wanting. Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, is depicted as a latter-day Monmouth, a victim of flattery.88 The rebellion itself is execrated as a crime, and the rebels are criminals: ‘No, I abhor, equally with yourselves, a Crime of so black and heinous a Nature’.89 True, the Compendium writer is preoccupied with the exciting question of the whereabouts of this will-o’-the-wisp Stuart prince, but it is less the man who attracts his attention than the ingenuity of the press in manufacturing stories about him. The Jacobite rebels, the rebellion and its lamentable aftermath, are presented as threads in a complex and cynical picture of the condition of England in the post-invasion summer. In the absence of contemporary commentary it is impossible to say for sure, but there is nothing to suggest that The Parrot was read specifically as Jacobite propaganda. An epilogue to the story of Dawson’s fiancée attests both the power and the cultural effacement of Haywood’s imagination. The fabricated romance created for the weekly Compendium enjoyed a storied afterlife in Scots poetry and prose. It entered the literary mainstream in the form of an often reprinted ballad by William Shenstone entitled ‘Jemmy Dawson’ and dated to ‘about the Time of his Execution, in the Year 1745’ and much praised for its affecting properties. The ballad made it into a crime collection as an illustration of ‘unexampled love’.90 The European Magazine recounts in January 1801 that this ‘pathetic and affecting ballad has drawn tears from every eye capable of the feelings of humanity for near half a century’.91 Haywood’s original prose version was lifted whole cloth for The Glasgow Miscellany (1800), said to be ‘founded in truth’ and ‘taken from a narrative first published in a periodical work, entitled The Parrot, Saturday, 2d August 1746, three days after the transaction’.92 A plagiarized version turns up in the nineteenth century History of the Highlands and of the Highlands Clans attributed to Shenstone, who ‘commemorated this melancholy event in his plaintive ballad of “Jemmy Dawson”’.93 Dawson’s fiancée has re-emerged in our own time as a cameo in an often-cited historical monograph on the FortyFive where the story has been given an added flourish: the spectacle of James Dawson’s death not only caused his sweetheart to expire of shock but also, in this version, ‘produced public revulsion’.94 The afterlife of these invented lovers and their translation into first historical and then scholarly fact, shorn in each instance of their originary association with their author, is an example of the way the historical record has expunged Haywood while keeping her now unattributed romances in circulation.

The Parrot Shuts Down It is hardly surprising that The Parrot lasted no more than nine numbers. Newspaper ventures failed more often than not in the period and this was especially true of political papers, which often had ad hoc political agendas. In addition,

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it cannot be gainsaid that the The Parrot flirted with dangerous materials. The scathing representation of the king’s younger son as the sadistic Oram would surely qualify as seditious libel in being ‘likely to bring into hatred or contempt, or to excite disaffection against, the King and his heirs’.95 Press historians, however, seem unaware of the existence of The Parrot or its legitimate claims to at least crypto-Jacobite status. Most follow Jeremy Black, who identified the National Journal, or, the Country Gazette, the short-lived tri-weekly launched by George Gordon, as the ‘sole Jacobite paper active in England during the period of the ‘45’.96 Robert Harris, who has looked closely at the press in the time of post-invasion anti-Jacobite hysteria, is able to locate ‘only one paper that could reasonably be called Jacobite’, National Journal.97 But plainly The Parrot needs to be read in relation to the Jacobite press in the summer of 1746. On first reading the final number gives no sign of imminent demise – none of those ceremonial leave-taking gestures that ordinarily signal a run coming to an end – and, moreover, the final paragraph promises matters of ‘great Antiquity’ in the next number, a promise of safe subject matter, one might guess. Yet rereading The Parrot No. 9, published on 4 October, with an awareness of its finality, one picks up internal clues that at least by late September the author and her associates may have come under government scrutiny.98 The immediate press context lends support to the possibility. Suspensions of Habeas Corpus during the Jacobite crisis in combination with the swelling of popular support for the Hanoverian regime gave greater confidence to the authorities and, according to Michael Harris, members of the opposition press felt themselves ‘more vulnerable to attack’.99 Harassment from the authorities may also explain the week-long delay in printing the final number. Prosecution was usually focused on the easily identifiable printers, but authors of essay papers were also at considerable risk. The government would have liked to have achieved ‘a total suppression’ of opposition essay-papers at this time, and with respect to publications that relied wholly upon revenue from sales rather than the sponsorship of influential patrons – The Craftsman, Common Sense, and Old England Journal are the best-known examples of subsidized opposition papers – they were often successful.100 The sponsored paper Old England, for example, survived in spite of a number of legal assaults, including a warrant for the arrest of the printer, publisher, and author in May 1745.101 The National Journal, or, the Country Gazette, on the other hand, a crypto-Jacobite paper that lacked both powerful support and the sales revenue required to withstand the pressure, had been closed down on 12 June 1746, and its printer John Purser was committed to Newgate on a charge of treason.102 Papers without the protection of well-connected patrons often buckled when confronted with even the possibility of prosecution since government action could be a ‘serious inconvenience’ even when it failed to result in a conviction: ‘the difficulties occasioned by arrest, seizure of papers, detention awaiting trial and legal costs were arguably

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as serious as the penalties incurred as a result of a successful prosecution’.103 If The Parrot venture had been begun with little financial support, as the relative sparseness of advertising might suggest, and then failed to attract a strong readership, and if Gardner, Haywood, and perhaps others involved in its publication felt themselves threatened with the possibility of legal harassment, they may well have calculated that the time had come to pull the plug on an increasingly risky venture.104 If warrants were issued for arrest of the personnel of The Parrot they have not yet surfaced, but contextual evidence indicates that the government was quite aggressive at this time in its attempts at control of the press. Some passages in No. 9 read as if written in response to a threat from the authorities. In what seems a penitent frame of mind, the parrot first claims unwillingness to incur ‘the Displeasure of People whose Sentiments might happen to differ from mine’, but then, the old bravado returning, mocks the notion of free thought and speech in Parliament, the latter ironically termed the ‘Asylum of Liberty’.105 In fairly pro forma language the parrot-speaker continues to blast away at conformity at the highest levels, targeting MPs who would sell out the welfare of their constituents to ‘the Will of an arbitrary Monarch’.106 But almost immediately he swings around to recur to the dangers of an ‘unbridled Freedom’ of speech especially with regard to church and state (‘where there is no Confinement, no Padlock on the Tongue or Pen, what Lengths might both run into!’) and, even more surprisingly, would appear to affirm High Anglican principles of passive obedience and non-resistance, concluding with ambiguous irony that ‘Obedience is due to our Rulers and Governors’. In the penultimate paragraph the parrot-speaker, now sounding fully repentant, declares himself ‘a perfect Lover of Conformity’ and pledges to restrain his ‘excessive Love of prating’. With a flatness of intonation that contrasts strongly with the sprightliness of his address elsewhere, the newly circumspect Poll pledges self-restraint: ‘for my own Part, I assure the Public, that I shall take Care not to be the Vehicle through which any thing offensive shall be transmitted, and whoever expects it from me, will find themselves very much mistaken’.107 Is this assurance to the public intended to be a promise of good behaviour to the authorities? It certainly reads that way. The Parrot was not the only paper coming under scrutiny at this time, or so we infer from the sudden and loudly trumpeted departure of ‘Jeffrey Broadbottom’ from Old England, now renamed Old England, or the Broadbottom Journal. On 4 October, the very day the final number of The Parrot appeared, opposition stalwart Jeffrey Broadbottom took his leave of Old England Journal. ( Jeffrey, it will be recalled, declared himself a supporter of The Female Spectator early the previous year.) He was replaced on the masthead by Argus Centoculi, who takes over the editorial function in this issue and closes his first leader by disavowing ‘Rebellion and Causers of Rebellion’, but not without first offering a zany account of the circumstances that had brought ‘Poor Jeffrey’ to this pass. It is an account worth summarizing for the light it may throw on on the goings on

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at The Parrot. Jeffrey, it seems, had survived abandonment by his sponsors and colleagues, ‘the scandalous Desertion of certain Patriot Friends and Coadjutors’, the reference being to the withdrawal of Chesterfield – and probably Ralph and Guthrie as well – once Chesterfield was admitted to the government as part of the Broad-Bottom accommodation in 1744. He had carried on despite government attempts to pension him into silence (‘they could not stop his Mouth with a Place’), but was at last undone by the muzzling effect that the latest suspension of Habeas Corpus had ‘upon that useful Part of his Majesty’s good Subjects inhabiting the Garrets of Grubstreet’, that is, the political journalists: But, alack-a-day! there is no contending with Power supported by Numbers. The Coalition, frighten’d by a few ragged Highlanders, call’d in the House of Monosyllabae to their Assistance, who laying hold on poor Habeas, muffl’d up his Chops, and put him under such an Inchantment as suspended all his Faculties and Virtues for Six Months; and thereupon issued out divers State-Bulls with broad Philacteries in their Front, direfully inscrib’d Treasonable Practices; which had such a terrible Effect upon that useful Part of his Majesty’s good Subjects inhabiting the Garrets of Grubstreet, that they became speechless in their political Capacity, or were so taken with the Cramp in their Fingers that they could hardly hold a Pen between them ever since.108

It is suggestive that the final number of The Parrot came out the same day that ‘poor Jeffrey’ made his departure from Old England, and hard not to suspect that personnel at the two papers were responding to similar and possibly coordinated threats, especially in light of the demonstrable connections between The Female Spectator and Old England. Finally, it is worth noting that Jeffrey’s response to the continuing suspension of Habeas is rendered in language that recalls the effects of oppressive authority on the erstwhile garrulous parrot when presented with the fly-mangling activities of the egregious Oram. Jeffrey, very like the parrot, ‘became still more dull, as he did not dare venture to speak his Mind, or even mutter a Word of Truth’.109 In this light, the parrot-speaker’s assurances in No. 9 that he would not serve as a vehicle for the transmission of anything offensive gives reason to suspect that Haywood and the personnel of The Parrot believed themselves to be in some danger of being rendered, by one route or another, speechless and were therefore signaling their willingness to become, like Jeffrey, ‘still more dull’. In this light the parrot-speaker, always a ‘dangerous bird’, stands as a symbol of the precarious position of the opposition press. Robin Myers and Michael Harris write that ‘print marked out the frontier along which authority and dissent were ranged in various embattled postures’, and add, in words that apply in suggestive ways to The Parrot, that print ‘has provided the locus for a series of complex, obscure and sometimes highly ominous negotiations involving the shifting networks of interest which extended widely through society’.110 Issues of dissent versus authority, free-expression versus control of the press, resonate throughout The Parrot.

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Haywood’s parrot-speaker is at times a symbol of the free-speaking opposition, an avis non grata whose tell-tale prattling must be throttled by authority.111 At others, this prattler who fancies himself an oracle of truth-telling is a symbol of the vulnerability of the press and its contraction into mute fearfulness, as when the parrot is reduced to silence in the presence of Oram. We realize that The Parrot was always in some sense informed by the tension between an expansive conception of the liberty of the press and the prohibitions and political taboos besetting the press during a period of government clampdown in the time of the ‘laying hold of poor Habeas’. The parrot-speaker’s role shifts accordingly as on some occasions he exemplifies press freedoms, on others the necessity of selfregulation, and on others still the unpleasant need to assume a self-silencing conformity that verges upon abjection. Assessing the impact of the law of libel on printed political commentary, Michael Harris writes that legal action initiated by successive ministries in the first half of the century, by ‘limiting the range of political comment and effectively preventing the appearance of material that could be described as extremist’, served to fix ‘the boundaries of political debate’.112 We may never know why The Parrot closed after nine numbers, and many explanations are possible, but whatever the circumstances, the periodical stands as a singularly neglected source for study of the kind of debate possible in the press in the mid-1740s. Its involvement in mid-century debates on matters ranging from royal clemency to regulation of the press calls out for further investigation from press historians and Haywood scholars alike. The Parrot also suggests the benefits of broadening the scope of analysis of Haywood’s political engagements to include her polemical turn to High Church Anglicanism and religiously inflected social issues, an orientation that may signal an embrace of the Toryism that many critics detect in her early work and certainly reflects the Tory revival of interest in religion and religious interests discernible in the later books of The Female Spectator and increasingly pronounced in the opposition press in the 1750s. The Parrot shows her entering into political controversy more outspokenly than in any other work, Eovaai included, and contains enough pro-Jacobite feeling to lead one critic to conclude that Haywood’s ‘design [was] to create a Jacobite parrot, one of whose secrets is the unreasonableness of the English prejudice against the Stuart line’.113 Much more remains to be learned about Haywood’s position vis-à-vis mid-century Jacobitism and the press debates of this time. We will explore these issues further in her next major political work, Epistles for the Ladies.

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8 EPISTLES FOR THE LADIES

Haywood’s whereabouts and activities following the collapse of The Parrot are, as usual, obscure. By 1749 she was living in lodgings in Durham Yard, just south of the Strand, but it is not known when she took up residence in this possibly insalubrious location.1 Epistles for the Ladies, her third major political periodical, was launched mid-November 1748 with a release date intended to coincide with the opening of the parliamentary season. Its editor is right to say that ‘political and religious concerns are never far from the author’s mind’, but this barely scratches the surface of the intricate engagement with political themes in this work, which rethinks from a distinctively female point of view some of the ideas about national renewal set forth in Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King.2 In Haywood’s re-envisioning of Bolingbroke, the hope of Patriot regeneration rests with the ladies. The innovative feminism of Epistles for the Ladies is just one reason this carefully orchestrated interplay of epistolary voices stands, arguably, as Haywood’s most impressive achievement as a political writer. Prepublication notices give some indication of what was to come. The first announcement, from 29 October 1748, is placed in the usual promotional channel, the Whitehall Evening Post, where it takes the form of ‘An Address to the Ladies’ signed by the ‘Authors’ of The Female Spectator.3 The notice, which occupies the lead position, features a woodblock capital letter in which a trumpet-bearing man on horseback provides a visual echo of Haywood’s signature visual emblem, the figure of Fame. Epistles for the Ladies is the product of popular demand (‘It would look too much like Vanity to mention the Number of Letters sent to us, requesting a Continuance of the FEMALE SPECTATOR’), and the same team that brought readers The Female Spectator proudly offer this ‘Second Undertaking’. The short-lived The Parrot, it will be noted, has dropped from view. In the event Epistles for the Ladies will be elegantly printed in an octavo format with generous spacing and many decorative devices, one of Haywood’s ‘fine’ performances, and the link with The Female Spectator emphasized in all the publicity. Readers are told that the periodical will mingle pleasure and improvement, and are encouraged to submit ‘curious Pieces’ to Gardner’s printing office, ‘whether on Amusing, Philosophic, Moral, or Religious Subjects’. The – 155 –

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omission of a reference to politics is what one would expect from a periodical that seeks to establish itself upon terms of gentility. Subsequent announcements in the Whitehall Evening Post and the London Evening Post in early November set out a publishing plan that marks a return to the format that had worked well several years earlier with The Female Spectator. The monthly instalments would sell for a shilling and would eventually be bound, six books to the volume.4 That the project was already taking shape along certain political lines is suggested by the allusion to the ‘many worthy and ingenious Persons, who assure us of their Assistance’, some of whom are named in the coded fashion of the day: Aristander, Albinus, Leonidas, A. Z., Perollo, Stella, and Clio. The name that still resonates today, Leonidas, signals the presence of an especially high-minded patriotism. It could refer only to Richard Glover, the Patriot poet, merchant and leader of the City opposition dubbed Leonidas from 1737 in honour of the wildly popular Patriot epic of that name of his spawning. Within the Epistles he is referred to as ‘the Oracle of London’.5 Glover, who had been spokesman for Walpole’s enemies in the City back in the day, was a protégé of Frederick’s and said to have received from him a gift of £500,6 and he was associated with the patron, chief strategist and prime mover of the Leicester House opposition, George Bubb Dodington. The reference to Leonidas in the Epistles pre-publicity is the first hint of Haywood’s own connections with the Leicester House faction that had formed around the Prince of Wales. For all their similarities, the two linked periodicals differ significantly in terms of audience, content and aim. The Female Spectator wanted to be universally read, whereas the authors of Epistles for the Ladies proclaim in sundry newspaper notices their hope that their undertaking be ‘acceptable to the Ladies, to whose Service it is more immediately devoted’.7 Ironically, Epistles for the Ladies is the more pervasively political of the two. Explicit commentary on public political matters in The Female Spectator is confined to a few books, but Epistles is saturated with political thinking and topical reference from beginning to end. Both periodicals are oppositional, of course, but the later undertaking appeals most directly to landed classes and adopts a variety of ‘Country’ perspectives, whereas The Female Spectator is more middling, ‘townish’ and self-consciously aspirational in its orientation. The Female Spectator, one might say, translated the polite, self-improving tendencies of coffee-house culture long enjoyed by men (and replicated in serials of the Spectator ilk) into a monthly pamphlet that offered gossip, self-improvement, and some political discussion in the purchasable and thus woman-friendly medium of print. Epistles for the Ladies, in contrast, features epistolists of high social standing, members of the landed parliamentary classes who seasonally divide their time between summers in the country and winters in the town.

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In The Female Spectator crucial exchanges take place between the female editor and her mixed-gender public; in Epistles for the Ladies exchanges are diffused through overlapping epistolary networks consisting mostly of gentry women, and the political mood seems to lean toward the Tory-Jacobite end of the spectrum. The London-based Female Spectator was buoyed by the promise of a Patriot renewal, especially in the brief interval between the formation of the ‘Broad-Bottom’ government and the Jacobite invasion of 1745–6. Epistles for the Ladies grows out of disenchantment with that failed promise: far from eradicating corruption and self-interest, members of the erstwhile Patriot opposition had revealed themselves able to accomplish little beyond securing office. Epistles for the Ladies represents, then, an attempt to keep alive hopes of a Patriot renewal. By this time, Haywood comes close to identifying the Patriot spirit with women of the landed classes. They emerge in these letters as guardians by default of the love of country that Bolingbroke’s followers in the 1730s and early 1740s sought to inspire and then to all appearances abandoned.

Bolingbroke, Frederick and the Patriot Revival Epistles for the Ladies must be read in the context of changes in the political environment that occurred as a result of the Forty-Five, when popular affection for the heretofore largely unloved House of Hanover had bloomed so surprisingly. Two changes can be quickly summarized. First, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle of October 1748 brought an end to the long-running War of Austrian Succession. No one on either side of the channel was entirely happy with the terms of the Peace and Jacobites had particular reasons to feel irked, as will be seen, but the treaty did ease political tensions in Britain by eliminating a major source of acrimonious debate. Second, the weakened Tory party lost ground in the 1747 General Election, a circumstance attributable to the recent surge in Hanoverian loyalism and fragmentation within the demoralized opposition. Historians point out that the appeal of Jacobitism to the disaffected (in and out of doors) tended to strengthen during those periods when the Tory parliamentary party had the least to offer, and the period from 1747–50 was one of those times when the Stuart rose was in flower, tattered but still redolent. Another important context for Epistles for the Ladies is the discrediting of the very notion of ‘Patriotism’. Panthea, a public-spirited epistolist, ruefully concedes that the Patriot cause has become ‘ so exploded and old-fashioned a Thing’, but the fading of Patriotism was not universally lamented.8 The Gentleman’s Magazine registered prefatorial relief in the 1749 volume that political matters are ‘now reducible into a small compass’. The ironic reference to the ‘memorable conduct of the most celebrated patriots’ points toward Granville (formerly Lord Carteret) and Bath (formerly William Pulteney) and other leaders thought

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to have betrayed the cause in the scramble for office that accompanied the fall of Walpole in 1742 and was then re-enacted in the ‘Broad-Bottom’ accommodation of 1744–5, which demonstrated all too clearly that members of that ‘glorious’ ‘Patriot Band’ greeted with such rapture by the Female Spectator in Book 9 tended to lose their zeal for reform once they joined the government. Virtually none of the measures for parliamentary reform called for by Tory or Whig Patriots had been implemented and neither Walpole nor any of the apostates had been brought to justice. The fall of Walpole promised much but in the event delivered little, and the overall mood of the political nation in 1748 was sodden. One of the most public-spirited of the epistolists, the resonantly named Astrea, puts it thus: ‘some recent Instances have rendered the Name of Patriot ridiculous’ and rendered the term synonymous with a ‘self-interested View’.9 Glover, writing as Leonidas in Epistle No. XLV, is harsher: the ‘feigned Efforts’ of the Patriots ‘to serve the Commonwealth’ ‘have laid a Foundation for a perpetual Slavery’, they are ‘very Monsters’.10 What was needed was some kind of Patriot resurgence, and that would be supplied, once again, by the inspirational doctrines of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King, written in 1738, was published in authorized form in May 1749 in part to mobilize support for the Prince of Wales as a future Patriot King. Bolingbroke’s treatise was extracted and enthusiastically reviewed in the Monthly Review in May and June by John Cleland. Lord Bolingbroke, he writes, calls attention to ‘the imminent danger the nation stands in from the universal profligacy and corruption that have weakened and dishonoured’ his ‘sinking country’. He aims to ‘rouze its degenerate sons to some care for the retrieval’.11 Cleland had earlier written that Bolingbroke speaks to us ‘at our greatest need’ and ‘tends to light up in our breasts that sacred spirit’ that could return Britain to glory by driving out the ‘present prevailing, abject, unbritish spirit’.12 Cleland’s review in the Monthly Review demonstrates that Bolingbroke’s ‘characteristically heady mixture of nationalistic pride and impending doom’, in Christine Gerrard’s phrase, still had the power to inspire.13 Bolingbroke, who had provided much of the ideological rationale and rhetoric for the Patriot poets and playwrights associated with Stowe in the 1730s, and who was everywhere present in Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai, was being reworked for the late 1740s. The identity of the actual sovereign addressed in The Idea of a Patriot King was left conveniently vague. Political ‘expedience may have prompted Bolingbroke to leave the hero at the centre of his 1738 tract The Idea of a Patriot King without a name or family in order to fit both Princes of Wales, the Stuart and the Hanoverian one.’ This observation has important implications for an understanding of the strange mix of Hanoverian and Jacobite elements in Patriot politics in the late 1740s and more particularly in Epistles for the Ladies. Gerrard continues: ‘most declarations of Patriot kingship – literary and propagandistic –

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were conducted within a Hanoverian framework, and not just by secret Jacobites trying to conceal their subversion behind a cloak of legitimacy.’14 The Patriot king might be the Jacobite prince over the water, Charles Edward Stuart, or the Prince of Wales closer to home. For his part, Frederick was eager to present himself as a Patriot king who rules without regard to faction or party. In the Carlton House declaration of 4 June 1747, he announced measures designed to appeal equally to Tories and dissident Whigs. Until his death in 1751, most intensely in the period 1749–50 when Haywood was working on Epistles, he served as focus of an opposition whose propagandists sought to ‘convince the public’ that he was ‘devoted impartially to the good of all his people’ and that ‘his followers stood for a real alternative regime’.15 As next in line to the throne, and as symbol of national renewal under Bolingbrokean principles, Frederick provided a rallying point for various strands of an attenuated opposition that took its name from his London residence, Leicester House. Leicester House was never a ‘united party’, according to Aubrey Newman, and the Prince no charismatic figure. It was a loose alliance of Tories, Jacobites and crypto-Jacobites, discontented (that is, placeless) Whigs, City dissidents and ‘Country’ adherents of various stripes, with diverse aims and weak loyalties. Leicester House, in Newman’s unsparing analysis, was ‘the party of those out of office’.16 Nonetheless it held out the hope of advancement to a mongrel collection of political operatives susceptible to the appeal of the ‘reversionary interest’ and they appear to have included Haywood, or at least people, like James Ralph, with ties to Haywood.

Haywood and Leicester House The evidence for her involvement in the Leicester House opposition is circumstantial and requires a degree of speculative inference. But that she was associated with the literary wing of the Leicester House propaganda campaign is consistent with a body of cumulative detail that includes internal references, telling notices in the friendly press and a pattern of points of contact with persons known to be part of the propaganda operation during the period she was at work on Epistles for the Ladies. It seems more than coincidental that three contemporary poets upon whom the periodical lavishes high praise – Glover, Edward Young, and James Thomson – had all been publically associated at one time or another with Frederick. All three moved in the orbit of one of Frederick’s top advisors, George Bubb Dodington.17 Dodington we have met before, for he was one of Haywood’s earliest patrons. His name appears in the subscription list of her second publication, Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (1721), as ‘George Bubb Esq.’ and in the second volume of Memoirs of a Certain Island (1725) he received flattering treatment as Dorileas whose liberality – a ‘Generosity, scarce to be equall’d, shines in all he does!’ – is celebrated in terms best read

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as a return on material support.18 A modern scholar has described him as ‘a wellpractised patron who had mastered the art of conferring favours in a tactfully obliging manner’ and his generosity was already legendary, but the length and sometimes eccentric detail of Haywood’s account in Memoirs suggests personal experience.19 He was a Lord of the Treasury by 1724 and for most of his career gravitated toward ministerial positions, but in March 1749, in a ‘decisive’ shift, he cast his lot with Frederick and oppositional politics, accepting an invitation to come over to Leicester House as Treasurer of the Chambers. The office carried a considerable salary of £2000 and the promise of a Secretary of State in reversion.20 The following month would see the publication of Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King and on 1 May, Lord Egmont, the leader of Frederick’s opposition in the parliament, would organize a meeting of 112 members of parliament. The new opposition that had come together around Frederick, the Prince of Wales, was heating up. Starting in 1749 Dodington managed the literary and press side of the Leicester House campaign and was patron of a public relations staff headed by his personal secretary and chief writer, James Ralph, ‘one of his closest familiars’.21 Points of connection between Haywood and Ralph go back to at least the mid-thirties, probably earlier, and significantly Ralph had been one of the two editors of Old England Journal at around the time Jeffrey Broadbottom endorsed The Female Spectator for its promotion of public spirit ‘during these degenerate Times’.22 Was Haywood on the Leicester House payroll? No confirmation of payment has been found, but circumstantial evidence permits a strong ‘perhaps’. It seems unlikely that she was a frequent visitor at Leicester House, and we will probably never know whether she moved among the ‘swarm of minor politicians, city men and local officials who made up what one might call Dodington’s lower circle’ for the simple but frustrating reason that Haywood was not the kind of person who got mentioned by men whose words were noticed.23 She had no political capital to be leveraged by her allies and little if any name-dropping value outside the realm of popular entertainment, certainly not among the players at what amounted to a counter-court. But she did have a past with Dodington, famous as a generous patron of writers; a long history of involvement with Ralph on a professional level, although to what degree remains a matter for speculation; the precedent of literary support for the Prince and his party in Adventures of Eovaai back in the first wave of opposition; known collaboration on Epistles for the Ladies with Glover, known to have been one of Dodington’s hangers-on at Leicester House;24 and a pattern of showing preference in print for oppositional poets with known attachments to Frederick, including Thomson and Young. It is not impossible that Ralph had commissioned Epistles back in autumn 1748 or, short of that, had offered Haywood some other sort of encouragement – at the very least, promotion on the pages of The Remembrancer, the essay-paper he

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was editing at the time. From items in The Remembrancer we can be sure that he and Haywood were professionally associated again by at least 1750. Ralph was accustomed to receiving financial support from Dodington and had been effective enough as a political journalist to be paid for his silence by the government, so it seems plausible that he would have been able to line up financial support for Haywood. To develop the relation between Haywood and Ralph during this period we turn now to The Remembrancer, the propaganda organ edited and chiefly written by Ralph under the pseudonym of ‘George Cadwallader’, which ran from December 1747 to June 1751 by which time the death of the Prince, 20 March, had deprived Leicester House of its raison d’être. This paper has received nothing like the attention given to earlier oppositional essay papers such as The Craftsman and Common Sense but in its own time The Remembrancer was accorded first importance. Other contributors included Horace Walpole and probably Lord Egmont.25 A contemporary described Ralph as one of the greatest of the political writers and ascribed to him some pamphlets regarded as ‘Master-Pieces’. He does not refer to The Remembrancer by name but obviously has it in mind when he notes that Ralph ‘had great Expectations from the late Prince of Wales, who frequently made use of Mr. Ralph’s Pen, in the Controversies in which it is well known that Prince was engaged.’26 Horace Walpole, who called The Remembrancer ‘the Craftsman of the present age’, depicted it as ‘generally levelled at the Duke [of Cumberland] and filled with very circumstantial cases of his arbitrary behaviour’.27 Cumberland, it will be recalled, was one of Haywood’s targets in the short-lived Parrot of summer 1746. The Remembrancer was launched on 12 December 1747, just one week after Fielding had begun his Jacobite’s Journal. According to Robert Harris, the Jacobite’s Journal was the hammer used by Fielding to pound home the idea, anathema to Haywood among others, that political opposition ‘in the present circumstances could only be motivated by disloyalty’.28 Interestingly, Fielding regarded The Remembrancer as his chief antagonist. In No. 17, of 26 March 1748, he slammed the paper as the ‘Drummer of Sedition’ used to ‘beat up Recruits in the Pretender’s Cause’; The Remembrancer blows ‘the Trumpet of Sedition’ in order to ‘blacken and misrepresent the best of Governments, and to harangue the People with false, plausible, and popular Alarms’ with the intent of ‘setting the Nation on Fire’.29 For its entire run, Jacobite’s Journal would exchange blows with The Remembrancer. In the final number, of 5 November 1748, Fielding declares victory. The disease of Jacobitism ‘rages not at present so openly and violently as it did a Year ago’ when, late in 1747, a ‘strange Spirit of Jacobitism, indeed of Infatuation, discovered itself ’. But this Jacobite spirit is ‘now become the Object only of Derision and Contempt’ because of the ‘happy Peace’ – the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle – that has plucked up the hopes of Jacobites ‘by the

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very Root’.30 Just ten days after Fielding retired from the scene of political commentary Haywood and Gardner brought out the first number of Epistles for the Ladies. In some ways the collection of (partly) imagined letters coordinated by Haywood continues in a different register the quarrel with Fielding that Ralph had been conducting on the pages of The Remembrancer. Epistles to the Ladies addresses itself to the world defined by the ‘happy Peace’ of Aix-la-Chapelle, a peace happier for some than for others. There was much in the treaty to displease everyone, and for Jacobites the Peace was an especially bitter pill in that it sent Charles Edward Stuart into exile again. Sophronia probably expresses her author’s lack of enthusiasm for the Peace when she declares, with reference to the huge fireworks display then in the works, that she will escape London to join a female friend in the country: ‘I shall leave the Fireworks to those who like the Glare, and fly to my dear Marcia’ by whose side she will ‘enjoy more solid Happiness, than all the gaudy expensive Rejoicings for the Peace can afford’.31 Similar disgruntlement is expressed elsewhere in the opposition press. Old England Journal, 6 and 13 May 1749, also derides the fireworks, those ‘besplangling igniludes cast up and dispersed thro the air’; the leader to The Remembrancer for 29 April, signed by ‘Anti-Pyrobolos’, grumbles about the public expense – the worst sort of ‘Luxury and Prodigality’. The money might have been better spent on the disbanded soldiers, especially the Highlanders. This is but one example of the way Epistles for the Ladies and The Remembrancer consistently chime in their political views, social analysis, and even language, and adds yet another piece to a pattern suggestive of a web of personal, commercial and ideological ties connecting Haywood and Ralph. Another layer of significance is added by a scattering of notices in The Remembrancer in 1750 that reveal inside knowledge about an illness grave enough to disrupt Haywood’s customary attention to her professional obligations and possibly to account for the one-year delay in the publication of the final six books, which were brought out not serially but in a single volume in June 1750.32 On 2 June 1750, The Remembrancer announces the recovery of the ‘principal author’ of Epistles for the Ladies from a ‘very great Illness’: We can with great Pleasure inform the Public, that the principal Author of the EPISTLES for the LADIES, (who has so long laboured under a very great Illness) is now recovered, and that the Second Volume of that useful and entertaining Work is printing off with all possible Dispatch, and will certainly be published the Middle of this Month.

The promised second volume would appear at the end of the month, on 30 June. (The last instalment, Book 6, had come out on 16 May 1749). That this announcement appears (so far as I can tell) only in The Remembrancer indicates that Ralph probably had access to inside information. Later that month, on 16 June, The Remembrancer puffed Epistles for the Ladies using copy that had

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appeared a few days earlier, on 12 June, in the always close-by Whitehall Evening Post.33 Addressed to ‘the Publisher of Epistles for the Ladies’, the notice congratulates the author upon her recovery and sends compliments in verse. It appears immediately following the leader in the top middle of the second page and is addressed by implication to Gardner: I was very well pleased to find, in a late Paragraph in the Papers, that you will shortly oblige us with a Second Volume of EPISTLES FOR THE LADIES, a Thing much desired by the polite World. I am sorry the long Delay of the Publication was occasioned by one of the principal Author’s [sic] being indisposed, and equally rejoiced at her Recovery.

The verses that follow deliver ‘compliments’ to the recovered author: Whether you shine in bright Eusebia’s Vein, Or the learn’d Mira’s philosophic Strain, Or in Astrea’s all-improving Pen, Your Sex’s Pride, and Wonder of the Men; Or if in diff ’rent Characters conjoin’d, We see one only great capacious Mind, Thanks to the gracious Power who bids Thee live, And to the wanting World new Precepts give.

Brief tribute is paid to ‘bright Eusebia’ and ‘learn’d Mira’, two of many fictional correspondents, followed by two lines to Astrea of the ‘all-improving Pen’ who is ‘Your Sex’s Pride, and Wonder of the Men’. The portrayal of these feminine personae as the outflowing of ‘one only great capacious Mind’ indicates an awareness that the extensive epistolary network constructed in Epistles for the Ladies, with its various characters and contributors, was largely Haywood’s doing. She may have penned the lines herself. That an address to ‘the Publisher’ found its way into Whitehall Evening Post is another example of the way the paper had come to function as a quasi-official outlet for the Haywood publishing establishment.34 On 19 July 1750 the Whitehall Evening Post gave over the first half of the leader column to a substantial puffing paragraph signed ‘C’. The ‘Muchdeserving Authors’ of The Female Spectator and Epistles are again heaped with praise and the unnamed chief author congratulated upon her recovery. Information purportedly supplied by the publisher, that ‘several Persons of Rank, of both Sexes, had expressed great Sollicitude, and offered their Assistance (if Money had been wanting) towards compleating the Second Volume’ seems intended to convey the impression that the interrupted work had gained a following at the highest social levels. To return then to the ties between Epistles to the Ladies and The Remembrancer. We know that Gardner and Corbett had commercial associations going back to the Champion days and that Ralph had worked with both men at that

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time.35 Gardner and Corbett were both substantial, well-established booksellers who worked in the Temple Bar vicinity on the western edge of the City. Gardner began publishing Haywood in 1743; Corbett established the Whitehall Evening Post in February or March of 1746. (The first surviving number in Burney is 6 May 1746.) Gardner advertised extensively in Corbett’s paper and almost from the start took in advertisements for Whitehall Evening Post. Also situated nearby was William Owen, the publisher of newspapers and ‘many pamphlets of a political character’, including Ralph’s Remembrancer.36 Owen was taken into custody 19 November 1749 for an issue of The Remembrancer published the previous day that contained ‘a highly ironical attack on the Pelhams for corruption and manipulating the King, and on Cumberland for his brutal administration of the army’, although evidently ‘us’d’ ‘with uncommon civility’ by the Messenger.37 It seems significant that in the following month Haywood herself was taken into custody for publishing an offending pamphlet, the purported letter from the Jacobite Henry Goring, and among those questioned was Corbett. This web of circumstantial evidence establishes that Haywood, Gardner, Corbett and Ralph were accustomed to working with one another on oppositional ventures, and it is reasonable to assume that Ralph and Haywood, as fellow authors by profession with a shared history of writing ‘in a political way’ would have collaborated to some extent on their two contemporaneous serials, The Remembrancer and Epistles for the Ladies.

Epistles as Showcase for Patriot Poetry The Remembrancer and Epistles share a common ideological debt to Bolingbroke which, in the case of The Remembrancer was marked enough to prompt Gentleman’s Magazine, in its notice of the first number, to entertain the possibility that it was the product of his ‘noble pen’: an asterisked note remarks that ‘[a]s this is a point [the need to return to first principles] insisted upon by the author of the Dissertation on Parties and the stile is correct and strong, we are led to think this paper the product of some noble pen’.38 The Remembrancer seems to have pitched itself to the dissident Whig side of the opposition. Horace Walpole, who contributed four essays to The Remembrancer and possessed none too favourable an opinion of the tendencies of Ralph’s writing, described him as inclined to ‘raise mobs by speculative ideas of government’.39 The literary Epistles for the Ladies stands in contrast to the argument-driven thrust of Ralph’s paper and, in view of its orientation toward the landed elite and its ‘Country’ politics, it appears to have catered more to the Tory side of the opposition. As a genteel alternative to the polemical Remembrancer, ‘the Craftsman of its age’, Epistles for the Ladies provided entertainment and moral instruction with an Anglican, high Tory-Jacobite edge, and in addition provided a showcase for current opposition-inflected poetry and poetic commentary. It includes discussion of

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poets who were patronized by and wrote on behalf of the prince of Wales, especially James Thomson; includes a letter from Glover; and features discussion, not wholly approving, of Edward Young’s work. In addition, the second volume contains poetry almost certainly written by Haywood herself and presented under the name of the persona adopted for this publication, the modest and coterieoriented Ardella. One of the early epistles, a letter from Astrea to her brother that will be discussed shortly, contains an adulatory notice of Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, which had appeared earlier in the year, March 1748. (Thomson would die just months later on 27 August 1748.) Thomson had been patronized by both Dodington and the Prince of Wales. His relations with Dodington go back to 1727, when he received a gift of £50 in exchange for the dedication to Summer. Thomson continued to work on The Seasons at Dodington’s estate at Eastbury. In the late 1730s he was friendly with Lyttelton, Bolingbroke and Pope and, according to James Sambrook, ‘readily lent himself to the political literary campaign orchestrated by Lyttelton on behalf of the prince of Wales’.40 Starting sometime after August 1737, and continuing for another seven years, Thomson received from Frederick an annuity of £100 on the recommendation of Lyttelton, who had become the prince’s secretary earlier that year.41 In 1742, when Frederick acquired an additional £50,000 as part of a reconciliation with his father, Horace Walpole commented that he would ‘have money now to tune up Glover, and Thomson, and Dodsley again’.42 (Robert Dodsley had published Leonidas, along with other oppositional works.) His biographer thinks that by this time he had become disenchanted with Frederick, to whom he had dedicated work since 1735 with little material effect.43 The Castle of Indolence was published without a dedicatee or any flourishes in the direction of royal support. Haywood was among the first to recognize in print the merits of The Castle of Indolence, but she was not first. Fielding gave it high marks in Jacobite’s Journal No. 27, although he declined to comment on its political implications, calling it a ‘noble allegorical Poem’ and directing attention to its ‘truly poetical’ qualities – its imagery, descriptive power, imaginative richness.44 Haywood’s Astrea also offers a warm appreciation of the artistic power of the poem, which she thinks Thomson’s best. The power and musicality of his language give ‘momentary Pleasure to the Ear’ and, more impressively, the force of the sentiment or ‘intelligible Meaning’ penetrates to the heart. Thomson excels in both categories, sensuous pleasure and sentiment, but what is even more important, at least to the patriotic Astrea, is that he seeks to awaken in his readers the public-spiritedness which in her view is the ‘noblest and most laudable aim of a Poet’. By arousing patriotic fervour among the politically inert he will advance a Bolingbroke-inspired ritorno to the ‘glorious Patrimony bequeathed them by their Ancestors’.45 She is quick to apply the lesson to her retreatist brother: she urges him to be ‘one of the first to break the Chains

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of Indolence, and do Honour to Mr. Thompson’s generous Advice’; the ‘Cause of Liberty, – the Liberty of Posterity!’ requires his attention.46 Sambrook’s assertion that no evidence exists to indicate that Castle was read as a political allegory by its contemporaries tells us, for one thing, that he had not read Epistles for the Ladies.47 Haywood’s Astrea clearly interprets Thomson’s poem as an allegorical reworking of Patriot ideas about the national fall into selfabsorption, decadence, and inertia in which indolence is virtually a synonym for the corruption that had been the target of oppositional writing from the start. She reminds her brother, and Haywood her readers, that it was by ‘Arts and Industry’ that the nation ‘rose to such an envyed Height’ and warns that ‘fatal’ indolence will sink it beneath ‘the neighbouring Kingdoms’.48 The obvious allusion to the Knight of Arts and Industry from Canto II would have been recognized by contemporary readers as a gesture toward Bolingbroke, who as the Knight will lead the Castle’s inhabitants away from the ‘soul-enfeebling’ indolence of their habitation to places of usefulness – to courts, camps, senates, and ‘public sage debates’ (LX). These men, ‘new-created’, their power ‘unclogg’d’ (LXV), will bring renewed energy to a nation that has lost its public spirit.49 Also coming in for glowing praise is the ninth and final ‘Night’ of Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, the ‘justly celebrated Divine Poem’ published as The Consolation in 1745, although the poet himself receives more reserved treatment.50 Young was not a political poet as such, but he had associations with Dodington that went back to the 1720s and ties with the Prince, who was godfather to Young’s first son, Frederick, born in June 1732. The poem is cited with approval several times in the first six books of the Epistles.51 The fullest discussion is in a letter to Mira from Albinus, the latter one of the contributors Haywood acknowledged in an early newspaper notice. Albinus is of mixed mind. On the one hand the ‘inestimable Poem’ deserves ‘Rhapsodies’ for its ‘Ineffable Majesty, Energy Divine’ and so on, but on the other hand the verses appended, ‘Some Thoughts, Occasioned by the Present Juncture’, are deeply offensive. They contain what Blouch describes as a ‘fulsome tribute’ to the Duke of Newcastle, the brother of Henry Pelham and a Secretary of State since 1724, who had ‘considerable power over the bestowal of ecclesiastic patronage and so was the object of frequent solicitations from churchmen like Young’.52 Young, in the words of Albinus, had exhibited regrettable ‘Party Zeal’ when he chose to praise a minister who, in the Leicester House analysis, was a font of corruption. A ‘sordid worldly Aim’ had animated Young to seek patronage from one of the despised Pelhams and especially lamentable was Young’s self-interested and deliberately alarmist appeal to ‘the Bugbears of the Time,--the Terrors A-la-Mode’ that in the year of the Jacobite rebellion, 1745, were the ‘Peal rung for Preferment both in Church and State’. Young’s noble patriot aims are undermined by his venal efforts at preferment: in him ‘the Patriot’ is sunk in ‘the Time-server’.53

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Of particular interest to scholars of the literary opposition is the letter contributed by the once lionized Patriot Whig author of Leonidas, for this is a period of Glover’s life which is otherwise little documented. His letter (XLV) opines on questions of the ancients versus the moderns in response to a query from Astrea (they are equal in ability but moderns must struggle against depravity and corruption), and it contains an oddly misogynistic moment in which he laments the ‘strange Metamorphoses’ by which ladies of modern times have ‘thrown away the Needle, and taken up the Whip’ in order to hunt with men.54 According to the ‘vastly inflated’ retelling of his life in his Memoirs by a Celebrated Literary and Political Character, Glover fell out with his erstwhile Patriot friends following the Broad-Bottom accommodation of late 1744 and did not re-enter politics until sometime in the 1750s. In October 1755 he ‘was being used by Leicester House to “stir up a clamour in the City” against the Hanoverian subsidies’. Later he would be called ‘Dodington’s trumpeter’.55 But this is getting ahead of things. During the late 1740s the two men dined regularly, as we learn from Dodington’s political journal, and Glover would be remembered in Dodington’s will with the bequest of a small gold snuff box.56 His contribution to Epistles suggests that he and Haywood were on friendly terms during this period. Glover is remembered today for the wild enthusiasms aroused by the epic Leonidas in 1737 when it was ‘cried up’ by Lyttleton on behalf of the Whig Patriots and for his leadership of the City opposition at a time when the commercial interests were clamouring for war with Spain against the more peace-minded course Walpole attempted to steer. Glover, as he tells it anyway, moved through the highest political circles and was on close terms (‘intimacies to a degree of friendship’) with Cobham, Pitt, Lyttleton, and other leaders of the parliamentary opposition.57 Once again we get the impression, never quite confirmed, of an Eliza Haywood in contact with the higher spheres of politics, but at some frustratingly undeterminable degree of separation. An unexpected source of patriotic poetry in Epistles for the Ladies is Haywood herself writing behind the nom de plume of Ardella, a name chosen for her poetic self that is resonant with associations, for it was used by the acclaimed coterie poet Anne Finch, a Jacobite interestingly, and thus associates Haywood with the modest poetic amateur of the manuscript-exchange tradition. (Finch’s association with Jacobitism at mid-century is not clear.) The inclusion of what is presented as manuscript verse may be tied in Haywood’s mind to the old days of Hillarian poetic exchange. Aaron Hill had died in early February 1750 and his passing may have reawakened memories of earlier literary self-fashionings.58 Ardella appears late in the second volume, in Book 11, where she appears as subject and recipient of ‘The Vision’, verses written by Hill in happier times and inscribed to ‘Eliza’ in the 1725 Miscellanies. In Epistles to the Ladies it is addressed to ‘the incomparable Ardella’ and said to be ‘a faithful Copy’ but, as

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Blouch notes, it has been liberally altered.59 Haywood evidently felt licensed to make free with Hill’s work now that he was dead. The epistle that follows, CXXVII, includes another poem Hill had written to Haywood, this one regretting her proposed voyage to Spain.60 Perhaps she was honouring Hill in this way or perhaps, as one of her amatory narrators might say, she was thus ‘giving a loose’ to her reawakened feelings for the mentor and poetic collaborator whom she likened to the ‘sun’ in the earliest days of her career. In any event Ardella makes a great show of reluctance about including it and only ceaseless ‘teazing’ on the part of female friends convinces her to permit it to be read, for the verses contain ‘so high a Compliment to herself ’ that ‘her Modesty suffered a good deal in granting’ leave.61 The poem is indeed lavishly complimentary. ‘Lovely Ardella’ is revealed in a vision to be a source of inspiration and hope, ‘divinely fir’d’, an androgynous ‘Charmer’ in whom ‘all that’s manly, joins with all that’s sweet’. When the same poem reappears again in Hill’s posthumous Collected Works (1753), it is titled ‘The Reconciliation’ and addressed to ‘Cleora’. Evidently Hill’s family saw no profit in calling attention to his earlier friendship with Haywood. The ‘celebrated Ardella’ is also credited with an ode ‘On the Birth of the firstborn Son of Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart.’, which is transcribed in full in Epistle CXL in Book 12.62 Internal details establish that she was acquainted with Sir Watkin, a leading Tory MP with strongly Jacobite leanings who has been called by a modern historian the ‘doyen of the old English party’.63 The poem, which opens with lines referring to the recent grave illness publically noticed in several newspapers, gives a rare glimpse into Haywood’s personal feelings. She had been touched by ‘Death’s icy Hand’, she reports, and ‘snatch’d from Eternity’s tremendous Brink’, lines glossed with a note that the ‘Authoress was just recovered from a long and dangerous Fit of Sickness, when she wrote these Verses’. The lines that follow confirm her personal connection with the Welshman. She is pleased to have an opportunity to ‘discharge’ the debt which truth, love, and ‘mighty Gratitude demand’, indicating he had been a patron of some sort.64 The remainder of the ode reiterates Patriot themes. Sir Watkin is ‘that excellent Patriot’; his newborn son the ‘little Patriot-Infant’, a ‘second Patriot born’ and the restoration of ‘Albion’s Hopes’; the baby patriot’s mother ‘the Lady of that excellent Patriot’. It is fascinating to discover this acquaintance with Sir Watkin, described by Linda Colley as ‘the main spokesman for principled tory isolationism’ who regarded himself and was regarded by other Tories as ‘the conscience of his party’.65 The Welsh Jacobite poet Richard Rolt in ‘A Poem sacred to the Memory of the late Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart’ extracted in the Monthly Review of October 1749, places him at the top of the ‘noble band of patriots’ who ‘still / Preserv’d integrity, nor basely rose / On Walpole’s ruins’. Rather, he remained staunchly ‘ambitious to expel / The vermin of the state’.66 Whatever the nature of Haywood’s acquaintance with Sir Watkin, she appears

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to have revered his political principles – ‘Each social Virtue, every noble Aim’, and it is easy to imagine that Sir Watkin came close to representing Haywood’s own political feelings. In addition, the poem shows Ardella/Haywood constructing herself as an oppositional laureate animated by beauty, innate worth and wit – and no unworthy admixture of mercenary considerations. She sets her pure and disinterested patriotic motives against those of Colley Cibber, the laureate of the ‘reigning Prince’, George II, who ‘tune[s] to royal Praise the venal String’. By contrast she seeks the approval of Sir Watkin: ‘Let me thy licens’d Laureat be’. Interestingly, she follows the Bolingbrokean line in declaring herself a stranger to party and contrasts herself as well with self-seeking ‘Statesmen’ who, whether toiling ‘For Court, or Country’ seek to be ‘safe’ or ‘great’.67

Astrea and the Spirit of Patriotism Intriguing though Ardella is, especially for the light she throws on an unexpected side of Haywood’s character at mid-century, the most important figure in Epistles for the Ladies, politically speaking, is Astrea, who embodies the Patriot political conscience of the collection. The first to admit that Patriotism has fallen into disrepute – earlier we saw Astrea acknowledging that the term had become in many quarters a byword for self-serving opportunism – and aware that professions of love of country make the professor ‘hateful to many, and laughed at by all’, she is nevertheless unwaveringly insistent upon the need for a revival of public spirit. She calls for politically engaged writing, satire if possible: the ‘Degeneracy and Depravity of the Age’ call for reproof.68 The name Haywood chose for this dimension of her authorial identity is richly significant, for ‘Astrea’ had special attraction for both oppositional and women writers. The daughter of Zeus and Themis in classical mythology, Astrea promoted justice and virtue on earth but fled to the skies to shine as the constellation Virgo when wickedness got the upper hand among mortals. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, when women writers began to turn their attention to large-scale social and moral problems, they reached out, quite naturally, to the figure of Astrea for their self-representations, bringing the virgin and her civic virtues down out of the ether, as it were, to comment upon the retreat of justice on earth or to argue for its renewal. Aphra Behn took Astrea as her pen name and Delarivier Manley gave Astrea the task of reviewing the corruptions and follies of the debased modern world in her scandal chronicle The New Atalantis (1709). When Haywood tried her hand at scandal chronicling in Memoirs of a Certain Island, she had Astrea, assisted by Reason and the Genius of the Isle, review the corruption and injustice that threatened to explode out of control in ‘a certain island’ in the age of financial self-interest. For Spy upon the

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Conjurer, a fascinating variant on the scandal chronicle, Haywood created one of her most memorable narrators, a lively and curiosity-driven ‘spy’ whose name, Justicia, is the Roman variant of Astrea. Her proximity to the deaf-mute conjuror Duncan Campbell allowed her a satirist’s privileged vantage point on human wrongdoing (often male) and folly (often female). It has gone unremarked but is surely significant that the three women writers who have come to be known as the ‘triumvirate of wit’ were all drawn to a concept of female authorship that has the idea of justice at its core.69 At mid-century when Haywood undertook to report on the state of the political nation in Epistles for the Ladies, she reinvented Astrea as a landed gentlewoman having ‘too much Justice in [her] Nature’.70 In this incarnation Astrea is at once an updated version of the goddess of justice and an exemplar of Bolingbrokean public spirit, immersed in a idealized country existence and concerned with issues taken up by the Tory press at mid-century, one being the dangers of atheism and irreligious self-sufficiency. (Admirers of Eovaai, that astonishing mirror for the political and sexual awakening of a princess, will be startled to find that in Astrea’s retelling of it Eovaai becomes an allegory about the dangers of inquiring too closely into religious matters. In this version the jewel that arouses Eovaai’s near fatal curiosity stands for ‘the Mysteries of Religion’.)71 Astrea delivers sophisticated political and literary analysis. In observations upon the latest item of Patriot poetry, Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence, she credits the poet with an accurate analysis of the ‘fatal cause’ – indolence – that has sunk the prestige and power of England. As befits her mythic affinities with the constellation Virgo, she is unmarried and exhibits no hint of interest in the conjugal relation. She follows closely the movements on the continent of Charles Edward Stuart, whom she characterizes as ‘a very worthy Gentleman under great Misfortunes’, which is in keeping with the Jacobite associations of her name: Astrea was foremost ‘among the monarchical images of Jacobite high culture’, according to Murray Pittock, for she embodied the idea of justice and served as an ‘icon of a renewing and ascendant monarchy’.72 Astrea’s most explicitly pro-Stuart letters seem motivated by traditional justice themes. When the treaty of Aixla-Chapelle sends Charles Edward into exile, she wastes no time dispatching a letter to him protesting his ill-treatment, voicing her support and sorrowing over the ‘Perfidy and Injustice [that] reign through every Climate’. She draws upon Dryden to implore Heaven to be ‘juster’ in its dispensations.73

Astrea’s Tory Brother The ideal of virtuous political engagement embodied in Astrea implies a satire on male dereliction of public service that is both general – men in the world of the Epistles to the Ladies fail to rise to the standard of public service that patriot-

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ism demands of them – and specific to party politics at mid-century. Haywood targets the widely recognized phenomenon of the provincial Tory withdrawal from parliamentary politics. The focus of the satire is Astrea’s brother, a Tory MP who would rather hunt, fish, and potter among the ‘Flower-Pots’ at his estate than attend parliamentary sessions in London – one of that group that Bolingbroke rebuked in The Idea of a Patriot King for abandoning the ‘government of men for that of hounds and horses’.74 The satire is introduced early in Book I in the epistolary reflections upon Thomson’s The Castle of Indolence in which, as we have seen already, literary criticism provides a platform for a Bolingbrokean call to duty. The times require public spirit and her MP brother is needed at parliament. He must heed the call to forsake the seductive attractions of indolence at his country seat and instead seek in the manner of Thomson’s Knight of Arts and Industry to ‘rouse a sleeping Nation; – to shame the present Age out of that Forgetfulness, which has very near lost them the glorious Patrimony bequeathed them by their Ancestors’.75 Her gentle taunt is part satire and part exhortation: ‘Permit, then, the harmless Bucks to range unmolested in your Park,--the feathered and the finny Race to escape the Gin and Angle; – a nobler and more interesting Cause demands all your Attention, – the Cause of Liberty, – the Liberty of Posterity!’76 The story line of Astrea and her politically derelict brother, which runs through the entire collection of letters, responds directly to the demoralization of the Tory party at the end of the 1740s when Tory spirits, seldom high, were especially depressed and the party in disarray. Defeats in the general election of 1747 had resulted in a secure ministerial majority. There were perhaps 120 high Tory MPs, and the party was ‘frustrated in its parliamentary ambitions’.77 The decline in morale is traceable as well to the failure of the ‘Broad-Bottom’ experiment and the pervasive parrot-like loyalism (as Haywood’s avian spokesman might say) that had such a dampening effect on the spirit of opposition in the aftermath of the Jacobite invasion. In Colley’s analysis, ‘Tory apathy and the party’s internal bickering’ contributed to the ‘poor electoral performance in 1747’.78 Nicholas Rogers finds a similar situation in the City where the ‘failure of the opposition to adopt a common front over the Forty-Five irrevocably splintered the alliance of Tories and independent Whigs that had shaped the politics of the previous two decades’.79 Add to this a long history of Tory distrust of the government. As Egmont wrote on 24 July 1749, Tories have been ‘so long oppressed by every administration since this family came upon the throne that they hardly know how to trust any of this family’. ‘Few of the country gentlemen, bred up in despair of being ever employed under this government, have turned their education or their thoughts to public business’.80 The Tory party, in Paul Monod’s words, was ‘stricken’.81 According to ‘Leonidas’ Glover, the ‘supineness of an effeminate gentry’ resulted in ‘the corruption of a servile and dependent senate’.82

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As a more practical matter, the Tory leadership tried to foster interest in parliamentary politics and especially to emphasize the critical duty of attendance for Tory MPs. It is no coincidence that Astrea’s letter to her brother first appeared in mid-November at the beginning of the new parliamentary season. This was the customary time to tender political advice in the form of pamphlets, ballads, odes, papers and so forth. In the weeks leading up to a parliamentary session, opposition papers and pamphlets would ‘relate directly current issues of opposition and opposition press concern to the forthcoming parliamentary campaign’.83 The importance of attendance was often stressed. In 1740 the Earl of Marchmont urged readers to ‘insist on the parliamentary Attendance of those you think proper to chuse’. Why? Because times like these ‘require Vigilance, Activity and Perseverance in the Guardians of the Publick’. Experience has shown ‘by how small a Majority Questions of high Importance have been carry’d by the Court in a thin House, which by the Attendance of six or a dozen Members might have been prevented.’84 In her commonsensical way, Astrea makes exactly the same point to her stay-at-home brother. ‘I must once more remind you’, she says firmly, ‘that some Bills have passed, which you could wish had not been so, when you were absent’ – absenteeism was a charge often brought against Tory politicians at this time – and goes on to say, disingenuously, ‘I am not very well versed in Parliamentary Affairs, but have heard from the most knowing, that Instances have been, where the Majority has not exceeded Number one.’ He would regret ‘so fatal an Inactivity’ were he not present to cast the difference-making vote.85 In the dynamic Haywood sets up, Astrea stands for an actively engaged patriotic love of country, her brother for the political quietism born of disillusionment and defeat that afflicted not only Tory gentlemen at mid-century but also, in Patriot discourse, a nation variously described as slumbering, sinking, inert, and indolent. In this way Astrea brings Bolingbroke down to earth, translating his ringing inspirational rhetoric into the practical terms of the day-to-day political world – and putting the impetus for change in the hands of women.

Male Dereliction, Female Resurgence Over and over the letters comprising Epistles expose men’s failure to live up to their public responsibilities. Male authority is repeatedly called into question, not because men lack talents or abilities but because they either have chosen to vacate the public sphere or, in the case of Charles Edward Stuart and Bolingbroke himself, have been excluded from office. Astrea’s Tory brother, as we have seen, attends to flowerpots and the finny race rather than public affairs. Publicola, a man of wit, learning, virtue and public spirit, is more weary than outraged. In the face of Astrea’s urgencies – the ‘Degeneracy and Depravity of the Age, calls loudly for a Pen like yours’ – he declines to write satire on the

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grounds that it is wasted in these corrupted days: ‘did our Pens become Scorpions in our Hands, this Age is too insensible to feel the Stings’.86 The poet Edward Young has submerged his talents in ‘a sordid worldly Aim’ and ‘sinks the Patriot in the Time-server’.87 The lugubrious Leonidas is so mired in despair that he can foresee only ‘perpetual Slavery’.88 Some of the men shown in retreat from the public sphere are plainly drawn from contemporary political life. The anti-ministerial City politician George Heathcote, identified in the text only as ‘Mr. ****’, is so dispirited by the collapse of the opposition into an unprincipled loyalism that he resigned his office as London alderman and retired in disenchantment with Patriot politics to Bath.89 Sophronia reports that his retirement ‘engrosses the Conversation of the Town’. Should he be censured for dereliction of duty or applauded for recognizing that political virtue is impotent ‘in corrupted Times’ when the only honourable post is ‘a private Station’? Sophronia seems to speak for Haywood, and others with ‘no Share in the Corruption of the Times’, when she laments that the inability to ‘stem the Tide of over-bearing Vice’ would impel such a man ‘to quit the Scene of Action’ and ‘bury those great Talents in Obscurity’.90 The plain implication is that men, the best of them – and Publicola, Leonidas, and George Heathcote are among the best – are overwhelmed by a sense of defeat. It falls to public-minded women to make the case for renewal. Interesting in this light are the variously angled images of female withdrawal from the fashionable world offered over the course of Epistles. Whereas men retire in defeat or discouragement from the public sphere, women retire from scenes of triviality or dissipation as if to gather strength. Male withdrawal suggests failure; female withdrawal, a strategy for renewal, as if refusal of the stultifying trivialities of feminine life were part of a process of national re-invigoration. Again and again Haywood urges seriousness of mind upon her women. Astrea turns away from fashionable amusements to read and study. In London she eschews the ‘thousand other Amusements of the Times’ in order to read in ‘voluntary Seclusion from all modish Entertainments’.91 Sophronia leaves ‘this noisy, busy, bustling, very foolish Town’ to enjoy the ‘more solid Happiness’ of the countryside.92 Mira delays return to town for as long as possible. Some of her women-in-withdrawal write with sardonic good humour. Gloriana, for example, has ‘retired into a little Cell’ to study philosophy and live the life of a ‘Female Hermit’ far away from the ‘modish Fopperies’ of London; a prospective visitor is forbidden to ‘mention one Word of Love, Gallantry, or Politics’.93 Sometimes the self-representations of the Patriot epistolists are veined with the astringency that others have noted in Haywood’s treatment of the triviality of fashionable lives in The Female Spectator and that recall as well the social satire in The Parrot. Amadea, possessed of a ‘serious Turn of Mind’ is repelled by what passes for conversation in the very parrot-like circles of high society – ‘the incessant Clamour

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of vociferous Tongues’ that speak without design or thought, ‘mere Words alone, which Chance threw out’.94 Again and again in this bracing vision of female capacity, Haywood’s admirable female epistolists read, study, think, and try to stir men to proper action. (Thus Astrea to Publicola: ‘I take the Liberty of reminding you what is expected from you, by all who have any Remains of Virtue, or Public Spirit in them’.)95 The seriousness of mind women cultivate is inseparable from the larger reformation of manners they seek to effect. The process of personal renewal in which they are engaged has national implications: a storing up of energies for the work of reformation ahead. Men are not to be dispensed with, of course; this is no separatist utopia Haywood is envisioning, no Millennium Hall in which women manage to carry on just fine independently of men. But in the satiric vision of Epistles for the Ladies men seem almost to be vestiges of an outmoded order, necessary of course, but in the final analysis ineffectual and insufficient. Feminist criticism in an earlier stage of development might have seen in this a strategy for subverting male authority, which in some sense it is of course, but I think Haywood’s political vision comprehends more than that. She is signalling acceptance of the status quo but sending the message that the culture must make room for women, must look to them – as in the 1730s it had looked to its Patriot playwrights and poets – for the satire that smarts and vigour that heals. The age must indeed look to women such as Astrea, and behind her Haywood, to administer the required scorpion sting.

Bolingbroke Regendered Epistles for the Ladies is a masterly regendering of Bolingbroke’s conception of public responsibility and obligation. It weaves a variety of epistolary threads to construct a comprehensive analysis of the dangers of political withdrawal in a dangerously indolent nation and calls for political renewal with a female face. The lament over the enervation of England’s ‘supine’ menfolk is a commonplace at mid-century, but what is original here is the way Haywood, out of repeated instances of male dereliction and withdrawal, builds a case for female political agency that is grounded in male default and, more interestingly, serves to rewrite broadly held understandings of public life and public service. For Bolingbroke and other ‘Country’ adherents public service was bound up in an ideology of a family-centred paternalism and patriarchal authority.96 The landed classes, under the authority of the fathers and brothers, were responsible for maintaining order and justice. Bolingbroke, Isaac Kramnick writes, ‘sees the origin of political society in families and paternal authority, and the function of government in civil society not as protection of individual rights, but as what it had been in natural society’, which includes maintaining peace and order, rendering justice, and exer-

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cising ‘paternal concern for the good of the people’.97 In Epistle LI, a spirited letter to a mean-spirited uncle who had accused her of ‘Excess of Liberality’, Astrea defends her practice of charity in terms that show her to exemplify in female form the Bolingbrokean ‘patriarchal’ ideal of paternal concern for the good of the people. Are not the ‘poorest Wretches’, she asks, ‘born Citizens of the World, and consequently have a Right to find Subsistence from it?’ She continues: ‘Not only Religion, but Morality, and the Laws of Society enjoin a mutual Good-Will to each other, and a Sympathizing with the several Wants, to which Humanity is liable.’ Astrea understands her place in the hierarchically ordered social world. She lives neither above nor below her rank – ‘my House, my Equipage, my Table, my Apparel are all such as might be expected from a Woman of the Fortune I am known to enjoy.’ A proper ‘Œconomist in these articles’, she has money available for charitable purposes. She buys with ready money, not credit, and so is never imposed upon by tradesmen. She avoids expensive pleasures. She does not game and, inevitably, she does not go to court – thus saving the expense of ‘at least three Birth-day Suits in a Year’.98 She is a model paternal figure with the highly consequential qualification that she is a woman, and her patriotic activism is grounded in the failure of the fathers of the landed classes – and their stingy uncles and indolent brothers – to do their patriarchally prescribed parts. Considered as a feminist work, Epistles for the Ladies is a significant departure for Haywood. The perspectives it employs are drawn largely from the spectrum of ‘Country’ positions and the epistolists come mostly from the landed classes. The Female Spectator had adopted the ‘townish’ perspective of a reformed coquette (as the editorial persona depicts herself ) who presents herself as a lively observer of urban life; The Parrot used the satiric device of the cosmopolitan observer to develop an outsider perspective on the parrot-like men and women of England. What these works have in common, and it is present in Eovaai as well, is an uninhibited proto-feminist syncretism. Haywood was not a systematic feminist; she had no interest, that is to say, in developing a sustained, consistent feminist programme. Instead she tried on one perspective after another, and by considering the role of women in the social and political order from first this and then that angle, she managed over the course of her writing career to put together what looks like a kind of bricolage of ad hoc feminism assembled out of bits and pieces of the largely uncongenial literary conventions and belief systems available to her – all male-centred and to varying degrees hostile to women. And she put it all together, repeatedly, with verve and originality. In Eovaai this amounted to transforming the paternal images of patriarchal political theory into conjugal ones that proposed the heterosexual couple as the basic unit of governance. In The Female Spectator she took the idea of the detached male social observer and turned him into a team of four women, one of whom, its ‘mouth’, neither

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married nor spinster, is deliberately and somewhat enigmatically placed outside prevailing sex-gender systems. Astrea in Epistles is likewise a single woman, or so we infer: the womanly estates seem a matter of indifference to her. But she implies a larger role than any yet played by a woman in Haywood’s political canon. Haywood does not argue for a more direct political role for women, for, say, an extension of the franchise to women – an all-but inconceivable prospect at his time – but rather for a more robust role within existing structures. It is as a sister and as a friend to men who are closer to the centres of power that women can find ways to exercise their public-spiritedness. She expresses the views, aspirations, and reforming vision of women of a certain unconventional cast of mind, but more than that she steps into the spaces opened up by the male retreat from the public sphere and in this way, quite ingeniously, finagles her way into speaking for the political nation – or in this instance, the landed elite that she treats as synonymous with it. Criticism often concerns itself with aspects of women’s writings that serve to erode male authority and subvert gender binaries, and much interesting work on Haywood has been and will continue to be done in this area, but in the case of Haywood it may be even more interesting to contemplate her adaptive ability to turn the unpromising misogynistic materials she had inherited into something that could be made to work for women.

9 WAS HAYWOOD A JACOBITE?

Previous chapters have urged caution in discussions of Haywood’s ‘Jacobitism’. We must now confront recent claims that have been made for Haywood as a Jacobite writer. Jacobite elements figure significantly in many of Haywood’s texts, among them three discussed in this book, namely The Adventures of Eovaai, The Parrot and Epistles for the Ladies, but Haywood’s attitude toward these materials is complex and ambivalent; ‘slippery’, as students of Haywood often say. Her moral imagination was certainly kindled by the so-called Jacobite virtues (constancy, loyalty, fidelity and so on) and there can be little doubt that the values she advances in her work, from seduction fictions to secret histories to political journalism, fall within a broadly ‘overarching Tory ideology’, or in congruence with a Tory-feminist world view. Stronger claims have also been made. Rachel Carnell devotes an entire chapter to Haywood’s ‘Jacobite Ideology’. She believes Haywood to be a Jacobite but concedes that ‘support for the Stuart cause’, as she implicitly defines her Jacobitism, was not conspicuous in the early work.1 At the other end of the spectrum is Earla Wilputte, whose impatience with a misplaced preoccupation with Jacobitism surfaces in her dismissal of those ‘determined to affix a Tory – even Jacobite – label to her writings’.2 In the centre is Spedding who observes, unexceptionably, that her ‘opposition to Walpole was tinged with Jacobite sympathies’.3 It is undeniable that Haywood’s work exhibits significant Jacobite sympathies but it does not follow that she advocated or even desired a restoration of the exiled Stuart dynasty to the British throne. Although not ‘a Jacobite’ in any but the loosest (and least useful) sense of the word, she found in the idiom, codes, values, and affects of Jacobitism a language of protest against a whole host of economic and social injustices, as did others at the Tory end of the oppositional spectrum. She uses Jacobite elements for a variety of purposes in her fictions, some of which will now be laid out for further study. This chapter does not seek to answer the ‘is she or isn’t she’ question but rather uses it as a point of departure for readings of a few Jacobite-inflected imaginative texts that provide more precise understandings of the depth, range and practical limits of her Jacobite sympathies. We can begin by returning to Epistles for the Ladies, a work for which a forceful argument for Jacobite content has been made. – 177 –

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Epistles for Jacobite Ladies In a suggestive article devoted to explication of the Jacobite ‘subtext’ of Epistles for the Ladies, Niall MacKenzie treats Haywood unequivocally as ‘a Jacobite writer’ and, pointing out that the expulsion of Charles Edward from France was ‘in some ways a more decisive moment for Jacobitism than 1746’, he reads Epistles as a response to the wound inflicted upon ‘Jacobite political aspirations’ by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.4 Epistles contains a web of coded Jacobite allusions and references that, deciphered, reveal the ‘epistolary network’ to be something like ‘a Jacobite club, a ladies’ literary equivalent to those gentleman’s drinking societies which we associate with the ceiling rose and the treasonably engraved wineglass.’ The ‘web of treasonable correspondence’ projects ‘a distinctively feminine field of Jacobite discourse in which deliberation on affairs of state is sublimated into domestic, conjugal, or amatory representations’. He reminds us that Haywood was arrested ‘midway through the production of the Epistles’ and was keenly aware of ‘the risks of imputing indiscreet speech even to a fictional character’.5 MacKenzie’s argument for coded Jacobite content is convincing and his demonstration of Jacobite echoes and associations revelatory. Even the editors of the Pickering & Chatto Epistles for the Ladies did not notice that Astrea wears a miniature of Charles Edward Stuart at her wrist and failed to recognize the reference to the ‘very worthy Gentleman under great Misfortunes [who is] obliged to take Shelter in a Foreign Realm where he was also ill-treated’ – Charles Edward, of course.6 Nonetheless, I am not persuaded that we are justified in calling Epistles for the Ladies a Jacobite work. The Jacobite elements belong to a pattern of deliberate ambiguity and equivocation that political historians have detected in political discourse and parliamentary politics at mid-century. Charles Edward’s biographer Frank McLynn is one of many who date a rise in Jacobite sentiment to the period 174950 when ‘there were many straws in the wind that indicated a revival of Jacobite fortunes in England after the disaster of the 45.’ One of those ‘straws’ was the widespread loathing of Haywood’s old enemy the Duke of Cumberland.7 The newspaper historian Robert Harris observes that the ‘depth’ of the political disillusionment that set in at mid-century would be ‘hard to exaggerate’.8 He links the flare-up of Jacobitism in the late 1740s with the general mood of disenchantment with Patriot politics discussed in the previous chapter. It is generally agreed that direct expressions of Jacobite sentiment were rare in Britain after 1722, but according to Harris when such sentiment did ‘rise to the surface it was usually during a period in which the Tory party was isolated or frustrated in its parliamentary ambitions’ – as was certainly the case in the late 1740s and early 1750s.9 At this time political terminology was increasingly ‘slippery’, as a result of the disintegration of the once relatively cohesive opposition to Walpole and the

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discrediting of patriotism that followed the failures of the Broad-Bottom experiment.10 It is interesting in view of the epistolary polyvocalism of Epistles for the Ladies to learn that the trend in the press generally was away from the one-voiced essay-paper toward expression of a wider range of political voices. In the case of the reliably anti-ministerial London Evening Post these voices ‘came to reflect different strands in mid-century Toryism, in particular the different inflections of much provincial as against metropolitan Toryism’.11 Haywood seemed to be responding to a similar set of influences in Epistles for the Ladies. The epistolary format enabled her to give expression to a range of ‘Country’ voices from across the landed classes, some with a definite Jacobite colouring. Harris and others, including scholars as different as Linda Colley and Christine Gerrard, have argued that the seeming Jacobitism that flourished at the end of the 1740s did not necessarily or even probably amount to support for the Stuart cause. Sympathy for a Stuart restoration was at least as likely to embody a Patriot appeal for national renewal along the lines envisioned by Bolingbroke in his call for a Patriot King, but whether that renewal was to occur within a Stuart or a Hanoverian framework was deliberately left open. Frederick may have been ‘unimpressive’ as ‘a man’, as Colley observes, but ‘his potential kingship and the English upbringing of his sons could serve both to reanimate tory royalism, and to attract disillusioned crypto Jacobites like the London M.P., George Heathcote, and Lord Orrery.’12 Howard Erskine-Hill describes this way of thinking as ‘twofold vision’, that is, a way of holding simultaneously in mind ‘two communities of allegiance’ based upon different dynastic claims, and it serves as a useful frame for considering the Jacobite elements in Epistles for the Ladies.13 Among the many illustrations of this ‘twofold vision’ in Epistles one of the most striking is the ambiguity surrounding the ‘Restoration’ to Ardella of a precious silver medal that bears a likeness of a ‘truly illustrious young Hero’. The likeness recalls Charles Edward Stuart but simultaneously evokes thoughts of a certain admired ‘amiable Person’, the latter an allusion to Frederick, the Prince of Wales, often referred to as ‘a most amiable Prince’, said to be (in Frances Brooke’s phrase) the ‘Friend of Human kind’.14 The ‘twofold vision’ comes into play in the cryptic commentary regarding the garden of Astrea’s indolent Tory brother. In the early books, the brother exemplifies the inactivity that his Patriot sister laments. In a later appearance, in Book 9, he has come around, to Astrea’s delight, as evidenced by a newly discovered ‘Genius in rural Elegance’ – Patriot garden design in the manner of the famous gardens at Stowe. The garden evinces a noble spirit; it bespeaks ‘Reverence to the Virtues of Antiquity’ and displays patriot ‘Hieroglyphics’ with a statue of a British hero or ‘distinguished Patriot’ in each of five parts and at its centre a statue of Liberty. A happy Astrea is convinced that, ‘with how much Indolence soever my Brother behaves in public Affairs, his Mind seems not quite void of that noble Spirit, which invigorated our Ances-

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tors.’ She commends him and, in response to her hope that he will translate these virtues into action, he replies with a near-perfect opacity that leaves all possibilities open: ‘you must give me leave to wait for a Time, in which the Virtues meant shall become less obnoxious.’15 The openly Jacobite story that follows may hint at his allegiances. Astrea and her brother befriend a woman they find bleeding and nearly dead in their park. Out of a complicated story of betrayals, kidnappings, assaults and the like it emerges that she is the daughter of a grasping, newly wealthy Harlowe-like father – Clarissa began publication in 1748 – whose desire for family aggrandizement has led him to take ‘all Opportunities of testifying his Attachment to the present Possessors of the Throne of Great Britain’ so as to secure places in the government for his sons.16 The daughter, Altezeera, possessed of Jacobite principles herself, falls in love with another Jacobite, Philander, and, skipping over various complications and subplots, the story ends with Astrea and her brother orchestrating a marriage between the Jacobite lovers against paternal (and by implication Hanoverian) opposition. For once Astrea’s brother is a very model of activity. He exerts all his efforts toward seeing that the lovers manage to thwart the will of the father, reasoning that ‘A Husband’s Power abrogates that of a Father’ who would not dare ‘attempt any Thing to disannul what the Church has confirmed’.17 Reading allegorically this would seem to represent a Jacobite union accomplished in almost insouciant disregard of Hanoverian authority – an expression, arguably, of Jacobite longing for the union of the country with its rightful monarch. Astrea’s summing up evokes the analogy between Jacobitism and constancy that is present in Haywood’s writing almost from the start: they are a pair of lovers ‘who have suffered enough for each other, to bring Constancy into Fashion again’.18 Taken in isolation the story of Altezeera and the passages identified by MacKenzie and Carnell are unquestionably Jacobite and bespeak, at the least, disaffection from the present Hanoverian regime, but they must be read alongside and in some kind of balance with other voices and viewpoints that Haywood incorporates within this ‘epistolary network’, including those directing sympathies toward the Hanoverian heir and potential Patriot King, Frederick the Prince of Wales. It is suggestive, to say the least, that Haywood claimed acquaintance and perhaps more with the Welsh M.P. Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, a Tory isolationist with definite Jacobite leanings, but her admiration for ‘that excellent Patriot’ must be read in tandem with declared allegiances to Patriots of different stripes expressed in the course of the twelve books of Epistles for the Ladies – such as that revealed in her exchange with the City merchant and dissident Whig leader Richard Glover and, more tellingly perhaps, her behind-the-scenes association with James Ralph, paid propagandist for the Leicester House opposition who unquestionably wrote to advance Frederick’s cause. We might consider too her praise of Frederick of Prussia, a Bolingbrokean Patriot King celebrated

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as ‘the common Father of his People’.19 Jacobitism, it seems to me, supplied her with a language to express opposition without necessarily implying support for an actual Stuart restoration. It is a slippery position and we see just how slippery, and dangerous as well, in her next ‘Jacobite’ work, A Letter from H—G---g … to a Particular Friend (1749), or the Goring pamphlet, as it shall be called.

The Goring Pamphlet The publication of Epistles for the Ladies was interrupted by a grave illness, as we have seen, but also by Haywood’s arrest and detention on charges of seditious libel in connection with her publication of the Goring pamphlet. It offers a glamorous portrait of Charles Edward Stuart in a letter purportedly written by his equerry and (as the fiction would have it) travelling companion, Henry Goring. This pamphlet is thought by some to be closest thing to an unequivocally Jacobite work in the oeuvre. It has been called a ‘work of Jacobite political propaganda’ (Carnell) and a ‘work of impudent Jacobitism’ (MacKenzie). For Ingrassia, the pamphlet, which combines ‘romantic fiction and loosely written philosophy’, shows ‘a rather reverent attitude toward the Young Chevalier and, at times, levels thinly veiled criticism at George II’ but the ‘text as a whole is not necessarily inflammatory’.20 She regards it chiefly as an attempt to exploit a market for Bonnie Prince Charles romances. Similarly, Spedding believes the Goring pamphlet was written to capitalize on the ‘popular interest, and the sympathy that remained for the Stuarts’.21 A nineteenth-century biographer of Charles Edward Stuart, unaware of the Haywood connection, describes it as a ‘Jacobite tract’ ‘meant to keep up the spirits of the faithful’, and believes the unknown author ‘really had some information, though he is often either mistaken, or fables by way of a “blind”’ but in the final analysis ‘there is not a word of truth’ in it.22 Ironically, we cannot even be certain that Haywood actually wrote the Goring pamphlet.23 She denied authorship, of course. The Goring pamphlet is one of a number of romanticized prose fictions published in the second half of the 1740s said to draw upon the glow of romance and mystery ‘surrounding the glamorous, melancholy figure of Prince Charles Edward himself ’ in the aftermath of the failed rebellion.24 One of these, Ascanius; or, The Young Adventurer. A True History (1746) was written by Ralph Griffiths, founder and editor of the Monthly Review, who appears to have had inside information on Haywood. The seemingly well-informed review of the Goring pamphlet in January 1750 furnishes some evidence of Haywood’s authorship. It opens: ‘The noted Mrs. H—d, author of four volumes of novels well known, and other romantic performances, is the reputed author of this pretended letter’.25 Jacobite portrayals of Stuart claimants usually had ‘a fairy tale atmosphere’, according to Monod, and the exploits of Charles Edward in the Forty-Five

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‘quickly became the stuff of myth’.26 In addition to Griffith’s Ascanius and Haywood’s Letter to H---- G---g, he names two other ‘fabulous accounts’ – Alexis; or, The Young Adventurer (1746) and Young Juba (1748). Alexis, described by Griffiths as ‘a virulent Jacobite Tract’ then ‘in every body’s hands’, was unsparing of Cumberland, identified in the key beside the code name ‘Sa-gui-ius’ as ‘Some butchering Fellow’.27 Griffiths’ own contribution, Ascanius, the most popular of these accounts, was a highly circumstantial and not very fairy tale-like ‘true history’ of Charles’s wanderings in Scotland that renders the story of his survival under the most trying circumstances in often gripping detail. (According to Griffiths’ own account the details were gathered from the London Gazette and ‘other news Papers’). What makes Ascanius particularly interesting for our purposes is that its publication created for Griffiths legal problems, detailed in a group of documents assembled by Lewis M. Knapp, that throw light on the perils of writing on Jacobite subjects at this time. Griffiths would later express remorse at causing the government even ‘one moment’s uneasiness’ with Ascanius, but one has to wonder what he thought the official response would be to his glowing portrait of the Stuart prince capable of enduring the most appalling privations while remaining through it all fearless, generous, cheerful, and resolved. Surely he might have expected the government to treat it, as Knapp has remarked, as ‘dangerous propaganda’.28 Even before Ascanius, Griffiths had incurred the displeasure of the authorities by publishing one of the pamphlets on the execution of the rebels in 1746 discussed earlier, which he described in a petition to Newcastle as a ‘Pamphlett entitled Copies of the Letters & Papers delivered at their Execution by the nine Rebels who suffered Death July 30th 1746’.29 Two impressions were confiscated and he reckoned he had lost ‘at least forty Pounds’ in the transaction. He claimed additionally that he ‘wrote and published at my own Expence, several Tracts against the Pretender & his wicked attempt, but by most of these Pieces I was a considerable Loser, as were many others who contributed to glut the Public with such Writings.’30 With respect to Ascanius, he affirmed he ‘did not intend to give the Government one moment’s uneasiness, or, by any means in the least to serve its enemies’. His design, he argued somewhat implausibly, was to gain an audience and then follow up with a sequel that would spotlight the Pretender’s faults. After describing himself as a ‘wellmeaning tho’ foolish young fellow’ who may ‘perhaps’ have ‘play’d too freely with edg-tools’, he promises good conduct and petitions for release.31 Knapp thinks he must have been successful. Griffiths was not a political writer and he was certainly not a Jacobite, and yet we see that twice he came under government scrutiny for publishing materials that impressed the authorities as being too friendly to the Jacobite cause. This is one context to keep in mind while evaluating Haywood’s ‘Jacobitism’ and her own run-in with the government three years later.32

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A Letter from H---- G---g, dated internally to 13 September 1749, is set in the months following the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle when Charles’s mysterious travels ‘incog’ across Europe occasioned sometimes wildly fanciful speculation in the press.33 ‘As something must be given out now and then concerning the young Chevalier,’ the London Evening Post wryly remarked on 28 November 1749, ‘so we are amused with a Story that he has been some Months incog. at Albano.’ The Goring pamphlet tells the story of ‘the P----’ as he makes his ‘mysterious Progress’ across the continent, ending up, unaccountably, in Lithuania.34 Haywood, if she is indeed the author, plays upon the curiosity aroused by the mysterious princely will-o’-the-wisp figure by creating as her narrator an inside observer, a gentleman of the bedchamber who is the Prince’s travelling companion. In a narrative filled with concealment, disguise, hints of an enigmatic affair of the utmost importance and not-to-be-disclosed enterprises, and with mounting expectations of ‘the great Affair depending’, the narrator creates an atmosphere of suspense and expectation of a privileged peek at the inner springs of an action still ‘in Embrio’.35 Part of the joke, if it can be called that, is that the various cryptic hinted-at revelations and indeed a certain ‘impenetrable Secret’ remain just that.36 The ‘great Affair’ is never revealed and, in Lang’s words, the pamphlet ‘concludes with vague enigmatic hopes and promises, and certainly leaves its readers little wiser than they were before’.37 Significantly, Goring’s hagiographic portrait of Charles Edward Stuart is moulded in the image of Bolingbroke’s Patriot King, the object of detailed attention in a recent two-part review in the Monthly Review. Haywood’s Stuart claimant, it turns out, is well-instructed in the history of England and a great admirer of the ‘Excellence of the Constitution’ in ‘its native Purity’ and, in the manner of a true English Patriot, freely condemns ‘all the Encroachments’ ‘made on it by Princes’ who ‘had aimed at arbitrary Power’.38 When he speaks, the principles and sometimes the very words of Bolingbroke come out of his mouth. Bolingbroke wrote that a Patriot King feels the people’s grievances himself and suffers with them. The ‘greatest monarchs’ are formed, he would have it, in ‘the school of affliction’.39 A reference in the Goring account to ‘L’Ecole des Roys’ inspires Charles Edward to exclaim that that school ‘must be Adversity’, adding that rulers ‘brought up in that School’ govern not ‘for their own Sakes, but that of others’.40 ‘How deeply he enters into the Interest of the People,’ gushes the adoring narrator, obviously impressed with the Stuart claimant’s Patriot King credentials, ‘and how just his Notions are of kingly Duties’; the ‘children of a King are the Children of the Publick’.41 If one reads the Goring pamphlet through the ‘twofold vision’ proposed by Erskine-Hill, the figures of the two rival princes of Wales, Charles and Frederick, seem almost to blend into one. The politically emblematic scene in which a foundering ship, the ship of state, is put to rights by the quick thinking of

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Charles Edward, who is the first to spring into action to shift the ballast, could refer easily to either prince. The point in either case is that the crew is ‘animated by his Example’.42 The near interchangeability of the two princes is most strikingly apparent in the celebrated fire episode, however.43 The prince-hero’s demonstration of self-control over the passions in this episode is usually read in relation to the early amatory fiction; Haywood is seen skilfully redeploying amatory materials toward newly moralized ends with Charles Edward emerging as the shining antithesis of the opportunistic penis-blinded Haywood rake-hero of countless seduction tales. After rescuing a scantily clad girl from a burning house, he is at pains to protect her from the slightest hint of an incursion of male sexuality: ‘It is impossible to express his extreme Caution as he put her into the Bed, to avoid every Thing that might have shocked her Modesty had she been capable of knowing what he did.’44 As Ingrassia and others have noticed, the scene deliberately reverses the standard seduction scene by redirecting the focus away from the ‘sexually vulnerable and emotionally grateful’ heroine to the man, who emerges as an exemplar of ‘virtue and sexual restraint’.45 Haywood thus repurposes the amatory hero – for the Prince, we are told, is a man of ‘Vigour’ and ‘amorous Complexion’ – whose ability to transcend his manly nature bespeaks his kingly virtue and whose very control over his sexual desires testifies to his capacity for rule: ‘Ah! how fit is he to govern others, who knows so well how to govern himself !’, exclaims one of the observers.46 What has gone unnoticed is that this scene was modelled in part on a real-life fire in 1737 that famously involved Frederick. On 6 January a fire broke out at the Temple in London and threatened to rage out of control. From nine until five the next morning Frederick was on the scene, passing buckets, cheering the other firefighters and showing great courage and presence of mind. He was acclaimed a hero. Hervey reports that he ‘exerted himself so much there’ that ‘several of the mob’ were said to have exclaimed, ‘“Crown him! Crown him!’” This was ‘reported to have happened among all ranks of people through the whole town, and generally believed’.47 The event, widely bruited at the time, was commemorated in a painting by Richard Wilson that shows Frederick the morning after wearing the ribbon of the Garter and surrounded by admiring spectators.48 The fire episode in the Goring pamphlet recalls Frederick’s parallel feats of heroism and may have been intended to leave a subtle impression of the interchangeable relation of the rival princes. So intent is Haywood upon softening the Prince’s Stuart features that he ends up an oddly pro-Hanoverian figure. His toast to the memory of George I prompts the narrator to comment that ‘far from having any Malignity’ to the family ‘which at present wears the British Crown’, he possesses ‘the highest Disapprobation’ of any discourse or writing ‘which had a Tendency that Way’.49 Like a Whiggish contract theorist he emphasizes that the ‘People of England’

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have chosen the Hanoverian family ‘to reign over them’.50 On the final pages he delivers a reasoned argument against the launching of any additional restoration invasion efforts: ‘I will never believe that the People of England, who have so vigorously opposed all the Efforts, both of my R— Father and myself, in Support of the Family they have made Choice of to reign over them, will be less warm in repelling an Invasion of any other Claimant whatsoever.’51 Goring then brings the point home in his own blunt (and equally Whiggish) language with the unambiguous declaration that the Prince will not rule England without first gaining ‘the Consent of the People’.52 If this be Jacobite propaganda, it is curiously writ. It is not necessary to concur with Wilputte that A Letter from H— G—g is parodic to recognize that a pamphlet seeking to minimize the likelihood – even the desirability – of a Stuart restoration amounts to a peculiar piece of pro-Stuart persuasion.53 To the extent that the Letter from H— G—g was intended as support for the Jacobite cause, Griffiths seems to have gotten it right when he observed that the fuss over the ‘offensive matter’ it was ‘supposed to contain’ was much overdone. His account of Haywood’s arrest in the Monthly Review makes the government look rather foolish for as he says, their arrest of ‘the female veteran we have named’ ensured that the pamphlet would be noticed and thus rescued from its probable fate ‘of being turned into waste-paper’.54 Certainly nothing more is heard of the Goring pamphlet again in the contemporary press and it seems to me mostly wishful thinking to imagine that it functioned ‘to publicize the possibility of another Jacobite landing on British soil’.55 A Letter from H— G—g was published at the height of the campaign to recreate Frederick in the image of a Patriot King and, paradoxical or counter-intuitive though it might seem, I want to suggest that the hagiographical construction of Charles Edward developed on its pages may have been intended to advance the cause of the Hanoverian Prince of Wales. At the very least the image of a royal Patriot created in the Goring pamphlet is congruent with the more explicitly pro-Frederick propaganda issuing at the same time from Leicester House. True, Charles Edward is represented as a charismatic and radiantly fit Stuart claimant, a potential Patriot King himself who is only too happy to rule should ‘the people’ offer their consent. But he conveniently neuters himself politically over the course of the narrative and, more tellingly, behaves and speaks in ways that seem almost to figure for the political sentiments and capacity for heroism of Frederick. The Hanoverian heir, as a number of historians have observed, was eager to establish his continuity with the mythical Stuart past and collaborated with followers in devising ways to let it be known that he – not his brother the egregious Duke of Cumberland and not his father, the aged and uninspiring George II – represented the true successor to the glamorous Stuart legacy. It is not impossible that Haywood had been commissioned to write a paradoxically pro-Frederick portrait of Charles, especially when we recall her

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personal connection with the principals of the publicity arm of the Leicester House Opposition, in particular Ralph and Dodington. The previous chapter presented evidence of links between Epistles for the Ladies and The Remembrancer, the Prince’s paper. We know there was money for opposition propaganda between 1749 and 1751.56 From surviving records relating to Dalinda we know she worked on hire from booksellers at this time.57 Conceivably she was hired by Leicester House to write the Goring pamphlet to help advance the cult of royalism that was being bolstered by the reprinting in the same year of Idea of a Patriot King and a number of other mid-century literary offerings as well, including Epistles for the Ladies. As a final point, it should be noted that The Remembrancer, hardly a Jacobite organ, also came in for government prosecution at around this time, its printer and publisher seized by a Messenger, to the Prince’s great discomfort.58 Students of Haywood’s politics should at least consider the possibility that government suspicion of the Goring pamphlet was aroused not only by its pro-Stuart elements but also by its association with the Leicester House propaganda campaign.

Jacobite Ambiguities For Haywood, support for the dynastic claims of the exiled Stuarts was simply not a viable political position. She despised the Duke of Cumberland, distrusted ministries seemingly on principle and was happy to call upon Jacobite perspectives to express distaste for one administration after another. But nowhere does she insinuate the illegitimacy of the Hanoverian regime and, on the contrary, as author of Eovaai (1736) was one of the earliest imaginative writers to fable in support of Frederick, the Hanoverian heir to the throne. She fails to meet what Monod considers a kind of sine qua non: ‘both the idea and the expression of support for the claims of the exiled Stuarts’.59 Nonetheless, as has already been noted, readers are right to sense a strong Jacobite strain in her texts, and the remainder of this chapter will consider some of the twists and bumps in her Jacobite sympathies. As others have noticed, she was attracted to the Stuarts as subjects throughout her writing life. In the relatively early Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1725), some critics have detected a diffusive Jacobite sensibility thought to point towards some degree of Jacobite allegiance. The Agreeable Caledonian (1728), reissued posthumously as Clementina in 1768, is a sensationalized version of the story of the escape from a convent in Innsbruck in 1719 of Clementina Sobieski, wife of James Francis Edward Stuart (‘James III’, the Old Pretender) that embroiders fantastically upon gossip about the Jacobite court at Rome and offers a most unflattering view of the Jacobite claimants. James, the ironically ‘agreeable’ Scotsman of the title – his agreeable sexual charms act powerfully on a succession of adoring girls – is hopelessly

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inconstant, capable of changing fervently held romantic attachments over the course of a long paragraph. The emotional lives of the would-be royal couple are shabby, sordid and dangerously undisciplined and Clementina is most striking for her miraculous escape from the convent in a ‘leathern’ ‘machine’ that inevitably suggests a mobile condom.60 The Agreeable Caledonian reads almost like an argument against Stuart fitness to rule. Later references to Stuarts and Jacobites tend to be more positive but not without ambiguities. The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), one of Haywood’s most popular works, is partly set at the Stuart court-in-exile in St Germain at the turn of the century, the ‘asylum of the distrest royal family of England’ where everything ‘seem’d an emblem of fallen majesty’.61 James Francis Edward is here styled the Chevalier de St George and is an admirable figure. The hero, the gloryloving Horatio, lands a post at St Germain as gentleman to the bedchamber to the Chevalier and becomes ardently attached to him. While playing chess with the Chevalier (Ch. 10), Horatio declares his yearning to go to battle to fight ‘such as are your enemies’, a yearning that he figures as an extension of the ‘most natural and inviolable attachment of my heart’.62 His devotion to the exiled king makes him, arguably, a near perfect Jacobite hero, but there are complications to consider. One cannot, for example, ignore Howard Weinbrot’s reminder that ‘Haywood’s anti-absolutist male foundling’, Horatio that is, ‘fights equally well for Marlborough and for Charles [Charles XII of Sweden] – but never for the Pretender.’63 There are also structural ironies that demand notice. The action in The Fortunate Foundlings is structured through two carefully balanced plots that remain until the very end in tension with one another, the first a male plot that centres upon Horatio and his quest for glory on the battlefield, the other a female plot that expresses the values of love and romance, including a yearning for intimacy, creature comforts, and domesticity. The male plot explicitly privileges fame over love, the man’s martial world over the woman’s domestic sphere. Its protagonist Horatio is turned on by military men. Given the opportunity to serve Charles XII in battle he feels ‘his soul glow with an ardour superior even to that of love’, and for much of the narrative it almost seems that the narrator and female characters endorse Horatio’s not-quite homoerotic values.64 But ultimately the dual-plot structure works against the endorsement. Haywood uses the female plot to subject Horatio’s desire for glory to critical scrutiny; the desires he acts upon are exposed as hostile to women, intimacy and sexual fulfilment. Tellingly, Charles XII and his betrothed (the latter a romantic invention) never share a scene. Horatio and his beloved Charlotta are separated at first by the exigencies of the romance plot but increasingly they are kept apart by Horatio’s single-minded and indeed obsessive pursuit of glory at the side of Charles XII, himself a strikingly ambivalent figure in British literature at this time. Horatio ends up in a wretched prison, Charles is defeated; finally, the plotline suggests,

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it is not fame that matters but rather love, which is kept alive in the female plot. In addition, a succession of vignettes illustrate the brutalizing effect of war on women – the story of the rape of the noble woman of Dresden is perhaps the most powerful – and suggest the painfully limited scope of female virtue when a male quest for glory goes uncurtailed. The Fortunate Foundlings is so riddled with ironies and complexities that one can only say that, to the extent that Horatio can be said to embody Jacobite heroic values and indeed Haywood’s own earlier attachment to fame, the female plot that counter-balances his quest for glory conducts a searching reassessment of the damaging effects of male heroism. In this work, women represent the reality principle, and men, romance. Another feature to be noted is the way male Jacobite characters turn up in Haywood’s fiction from the late 1740s in episodes illustrative of a ‘beyond parties’ perspective most often associated with Bolingbroke that serve, in Haywood’s fiction, to mock over-investment in partisanship. Again these episodes may have been strategically designed to lend support to the idea of the unifying figure of the royal Patriot by making political partisanship look silly and even dangerous. One of the best examples is Life’s Progress through the Passions: Or, the Adventures of Natura, published in April 1748, attributed to an unnamed man who is identified on the title page as author of The Fortunate Foundlings. (The two works were often paired in advertisements.) Life’s Progress is a study of the development of the passions in natural man, hence the name of the protagonist, Natura. It belongs to a small group of novels from around this time that directly engage questions of party politics and purport to come from the hand of a man that includes, in addition to The Fortunate Foundlings, the Henry Goring pamphlet and the slightly later Invisible Spy (1754). Somewhat surprisingly, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, also from this period, was sometimes thought to be the product of a male pen.65 Haywood’s ‘male authored’ novels expose the folly of political partisanship by ridiculing traditional political divisions as trivial and distorting. By their very nature parties are shown to be susceptible to corruption, self-seeking and misrepresentation. Life’s Progress through the Passions, a Bildungsroman, portrays attachment to party as one of the passions a young man must outgrow and also critiques the tendency of some contemporaries, Fielding comes to mind, to exaggerate the threat of Jacobitism. The crucial episode for our purposes occurs when Natura, not yet thirty, having taken a seat in parliament, is overheard by a supporter of the Court interest to speak a little too favourably of the Chevalier de St George. Tempers flare, they duel and it appears that Natura has killed his Hanoverian antagonist. The narrator draws the lesson: ‘see the wild effects of party-rage!’ As happens in fiction of the period, his duelling partner is not really dead, but no matter, for Natura is regarded now ‘as a disaffected person’ and has ‘incurred the odious appellation of a Jacobite’.66 Haywood’s sympathies are always

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on the side of the ‘odious’ Jacobite, the figure outside the political establishment who represents honour and uprightness, but there is a larger context that must be kept in mind. A progress through the passions leads eventually to the serenity and composure of mind capable of subduing the wayward promptings that result in the ‘rage of party’. In this instance, and elsewhere in late Haywood, it is often not political Jacobitism per se but rather the social phenomenon of the persistent and irrational fear of Jacobitism that interests her.

Jacobite Romance Where Haywood seems most Jacobite is in a romance Jacobitism that colours and organizes episodes and subplots embedded within largely non-Jacobite narratives but governed by their own narrative codes, conventions, ideals and affects. This imaginative Jacobitism is feminocentric and usually tragic; death and rape are not uncommon. It occurs in spaces and pockets within the text which serve to shelter values that fail to flourish outside fiction and are associated in a general way with the rejection of the modern culture of individualism, self-interest, luxury, political corruption and greed. Measured against the values preserved within these pockets of Jacobite romance, modernity is (of course) found wanting. We saw an instance of this in the Jacobite Yximilla and Yamatalallabec subplot in Eovaai that plays itself out within the pro-Frederick framework. There, in the story of a heroic love undone by Walpole-like greed and self-interest, we see Haywood using a Jacobite romance counterplot to grant a purely fictive existence to values no longer viable in the world without. A large and growing body of criticism, much of it inspired by the early work of Ros Ballaster, seeks to understand how women converted romance materials into explicit or implied political commentary. Nicola Parsons, pursuing Carol Barash’s perception that ‘Jacobite rhetoric offered a way into political debate that was uniquely available to women’, discusses the connection between women, romance, and Jacobitism. ‘Women are central to the genre of romance and were accorded a special place in these representations’, she points out, adding that it is therefore not ‘surprising that, once Jacobitism symbolically became an affair of the heart, women were considered to be especially susceptible to its lure.’67 In an early work such as Memoirs of a Certain Island (1724), Mira, the Countess of Derwentwater, stands as a ‘bright Miracle’ of virtue, her chastity, fortitude, magnanimity, truth, and tenderness existing outside and in counterpoint to the ‘real world’ of unrelenting vice and corruption that Haywood exposes throughout most of Memoirs. In the more realistically conceived fictions of the 1740s and 1750s Jacobitism is associated with high principles – often held by energetic young people, interestingly – that stand in strong contrast with the sordid ‘things-as-they-are-ness’ of the actual political world, which is shot through

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with the moral shabbiness of the elders. A Hanoverian MP in The Invisible Spy (1755), one Avario – avarice, of course – bluntly proclaims the self-interested nature of his political behaviour and professes himself unable to comprehend the ‘romantic unprofitable honour’ of his idealistic son: it must be ‘Jacobitism or something as bad’.68 And Astrea of Epistles (1748–50), with her admiration for the exiled Prince Charles Edward and her enthusiasm for parliamentary politics, stands for the kind of grounded-in-the-real-world, neither ministerial nor Jacobite position that seems to accord most closely with Haywood’s own political convictions at mid-century.69 It is possible that for Haywood Jacobite romance carried a more personal, even an autobiographical or familial appeal, and I should warn that the following two paragraphs are highly speculative. Spy on the Conjurer (1724) includes several pages of cryptic commentary that would appear to be about Jacobites who died in connection with the Rebellion of 1715, each a ‘Martyr’ to what is represented as a misguided and lamentable cause. One was the narrator’s brother, ‘betray’d to Ruin!’ and ‘impeach’d’ by the malice of an ‘accurs’d and most consummate Villain’. His mother solicited tirelessly on his behalf, but her efforts to save him were in vain. He was executed, at least that is the implication, along with others ‘on the same unhappy Score’. In vague but highly exclamatory fashion, the narrator laments the brother’s ‘rash’ and ‘unthinking’ conduct in terms that suggest no great affection for the Jacobite cause: ‘Mistaken Policy!’, source of ‘delusive Hopes!’ and ‘false, flattering Expectations!’, how many ‘wretched Families have cause to curse you!’70 This would seem a clear enough condemnation of taking arms in the Stuart cause, if that is indeed the subject of the narrator’s distress, but the passage concludes mysteriously in a way that leaves one wondering where Haywood stands: ‘a Time will come when all must appear without Disguise, and every naked Thought be disclos’d to the unnumber’d Millions that surround us; Dissimulation and sham’d Hypocrisy meet their due Reward, and Truth an Honour, however unhappy here, be crown’d with everlasting Praise.’71 Similar but far less opaque scenes involving a suffering woman and an executed Jacobite man occur in other works, including the Lady Derwentwater episode in Memoirs of a Certain Island and the story of Dawson’s fiancée in The Parrot, discussed earlier.72 The representation of Jacobitism in these episodes is ambivalent. At no point do the respective texts endorse the doomed cause or imply support for the political principles involved. The mysterious ‘brother’ in Spy on the Conjurer is the victim of mistaken policy and rash zeal. The beheaded lord Deleau (Derwentwater in Memoirs of a Certain Island) is ‘seduc’d’. Dawson in The Parrot is all but eliminated from his own execution scene, which exists to provide a stage for his fiancée’s heroic suffering; his political principles get no mention at all. Are these execution scenes substitutes for some trauma that Haywood herself suffered in 1715 or 1716 in the aftermath of the failed rebellion? The reiteration

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of similar scenes over the decades might suggest so. Historians tell us that some forty men were executed in 1716 for their part in the uprising. I have been unable to discover a Haywood connection among the executed, although perhaps now others will succeed where I have not, but I would propose as a promising candidate for further investigation a Sergeant William Ainslie who was executed, ignominiously on a special gallows, at Edinburgh in 1716. In the course of his trial for ‘conspiring to betray the Castle’ it came out that he did it for money, 100 guineas. He was not even a Jacobite. It is an interesting story, and Haywood did have Annesley relations.73 I have found no evidence of a family link but given the paucity of biographical data surviving, that is not entirely surprising. A family connection with this shameful Ainslie might explain Haywood’s strong feelings.74 In a compelling essay that brings together political sympathies and literary effects in an eye-opening way, Laura Rosenthal argues that romance plots in Haywood’s fictions offer a rich alternative to the material circumstantiality heavily emphasized still in that story of the rise of the novel that focuses upon the genre’s ‘formal realism’. One might build on this to argue that imaginative Jacobitism in Haywood’s fictions is part of a larger refusal to be subsumed by domestic realism or new understandings of Protestant national identity. Rosenthal calls attention to the Gothic vein in Haywood’s imagination and casts a light on her affinities with the ‘genre that comes to specialize in unwelcome and disturbing returns, in the overwhelmed rather than the triumphant, in sublime pleasures and open wounds, in dark-skinned madwomen haunting the attic in the house of fiction’. How fascinating to think that Haywood was working the leading edge of the Gothic surge in the British novel and that novelists at the end of the century followed her in ‘retracing imaginary steps through an old world’, ‘generating nightmare and fantasies about what has never been fully laid to rest and what might return from another time or another place.’75 This approach to Haywood’s relation to the rise of the novel is at least as productive as the usual attempts to detect within her romances the seeds of domestic realism. A criticism attuned to the political dimensions of Haywood’s fiction such as Rothenthal conducts, and which I have tried to practice in this book, bids fair to expand the range of our responses to her work more generally and moves us toward more precise understandings of Haywood’s sensibility, moral vision, and place in literary history.

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EPILOGUE: THE INVISIBLE SPY

The Invisible Spy, a four-volume work published in 1754 after three-and-a-half decades of writing for the public, is Haywood’s last major work and a fascinating reprise of themes that have emerged in this study. Paula Backscheider, who is one of the few critics to have given thought to this ‘almost unknown work’, writes that it is about ‘the power of print – ethical, economic, and political’, and she is right.1 The Invisible Spy is about many other things as well, but crucially it is a meditation on authorship in the time of politics, publicity and the emerging public sphere and, perhaps because it engages so thoughtfully what might be called the ‘media issues’ of her moment, it brings us into contact with a Haywood who seems almost postmodern. Just when one seems to be getting a grasp on this most slippery of writers, she gives us ‘Explorabilis’, the ‘author’ of The Invisible Spy, a multiple, fluid and elusive figure who is at once male and gender-indeterminate, self-revealing and self-concealing. The invisible observer seems a figure for Haywood herself, not least in the way he/she deliberately teases the reader with what can and cannot be known about an author at a time when print enabled the construction of a ‘hundred different identities’: ‘Some will doubtless take me for a philosopher, – others for a fool; – with some I shall pass for a man of pleasure; – with others for a stoic; – some will look upon me as a courtier; – others as a patriot; – but whether I am any one of these, or whether I am even a man or a woman, they will find it, after all their conjectures, as difficult to discover as the longitude.’2 The Invisible Spy was one of her more popular works, as Spedding notes, and the fact that it went through seven editions in English and was translated into German suggests the possibility of a broadly European readership.3 But was it recognized as ‘a Haywood’? The marketing campaign, which began in November 1754, appears to have involved deliberate obfuscation. The bulk of the considerable advance publicity was placed in the two papers that we know could be relied upon to work in tandem as the primary relay stations in the Haywood publicity circuit, Whitehall Evening Post and London Evening Post, and as usual the campaign was a coordinated effort involving Gardner, Charles Corbett the younger, and the proprietors of the London Evening Post. The Whitehall Evening Post led with advance notices, again as usual, the first on 26 October. On 12 – 193 –

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November The Invisible Spy was announced as ‘This Day’ published and to ‘be had’ at Gardner’s shop along with last season’s histories of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy. The same advertisement appeared two days later in the London Evening Post. On 23 November, the Whitehall Evening Post puffed The Invisible Spy in a poem addressed to its ‘supposed Author’ that would be reprinted two days later in London Evening Post. The poem praises the social impact of its satire on the metaphorical world-as-stage: Satire like thine, can best improve the Age, And laugh each Vice and Foible off the Stage

and begins with an ascription of authorship that seems intended to throw readers off the scent in its address to ‘the Right Hon. _________, the supposed Author of The INVISIBLE SPY’. The honorific ‘the Right Honourable’ could apply to women but more commonly was used to refer to men. It appears that the marketing team had decided not only to conceal Haywood’s hand but to associate this scandalous ‘spy’ with a person of elevated status, a man presumably, ‘the Right Honourable’ so-and-so. The attempt to obscure the link between author and title appears to have been largely successful. The Monthly Review, the most ‘clued-in’ of the monthlies on matters Haywoodian, does hint at her authorship: ‘This seems to be the production of a female pen, which for a course of years has often entertain’d the public.’4 Spedding points out that the language is similar to that used to describe Betsy Thoughtless in October 1751 and observes rightly that ‘[f ]ew other female writers would have fitted this description in 1754’.5 But elsewhere Haywood’s hand seems not to have been suspected. The notice in Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1754 begins, ‘The author, to account for his knowledge of the many adventures he relates …’, and nothing in the nearly seven pages that follow, which consists of extracts, points towards Haywood.6 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu read The Invisible Spy and did not much like it, dismissing it in a single word, ‘displeasing’, and was frustrated in her attempts to penetrate the unknown author’s meaning. She wishes the volumes had come with a key, for she is unable to figure out whether a particular reference is ‘intended as a Compliment or an Irony’ – a hermeneutical difficulty endemic to Haywood studies to this day.7 Lady Mary evidently did not associate the work with Haywood either.8 A blend of anonymity and oblique self-reference marked Haywood’s publishing behaviour from the mid-1720s onward. At one time this was read in relation to her sensitivity to criticism or fear of publicity, especially in the post-Dunciad days, and more recently her acts of teasing self-concealment have been seen as so many covers for artistic experimentation. This political biography suggests, additionally, that the role-playing undertaken by a partly masked author was a strategy for penetrating different niches of an increasingly diversified literary

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marketplace. An earlier generation of criticism often thought in terms of two Haywoods, early and late, pivoting on a mid-career conversion induced (some believed) by Pope’s unmannerly portrait of her in The Dunciad or resulting from Haywood’s analysis of the market for fiction, but in any case a conversion which turned the steamy subversive of the amatory and scandal fictions into a polite votary of virtue. That old ‘Story’ – to use Backscheider’s influential formulation – is now largely exploded. The story these days is about Haywood’s undiminished creative energies in the post-Dunciad period and the continuities that link Haywood early and late. The best criticism of recent years addresses in persuasive ways the question Backscheider posed: ‘How do we connect her texts, including those from the 1720s and from the 1750s, to each other in meaningful ways?’9 But if this study has shown anything, it has shown that it will not be enough to construct new linear narratives – to find didacticism in the early works, say, or subversive tendencies in the purportedly conservative later work – and it may be necessary to do away with linearity altogether in the case of Haywood. She was a mistress of multiplicity almost from the start. To comprehend her career as a whole we will need to see her as a slippery, fluid, multifarious, strategic, opportunistic, chameleon-like and performancedriven writer keenly attuned to the evolving circumstances of literary commerce. At first she craved recognition on stage and courted literary fame in her own name, but soon, adapting swiftly to the new and emerging demands of the marketplace, she learned to disperse her authorial self over a range of personae, masks and voices. In this regard she recalls one of her most appealing characters, the shape-shifting trickster Fantomina, a performance artist of surpassing skill who uses disguise and dissimulation to seduce, repeatedly, her audience of one. There are not two but many Haywoods. Some are anonymous or identified according to the ‘by the author of ’ formula and not a few circulate under other names or stand behind the various personae and identities that we have seen in this study, among them Justicia, the Parrot, the Female Spectator, Lady Flame, Mrs Novel, ‘Mrs Eliza Haywood, Publisher’, Astrea, Ardella and now, as a kind of roaming manifestation of them all, the gender indeterminate Explorabilis of The Invisible Spy – unknown and unknowable, capable of passing unnoticed through scenes of business and pleasure while flaunting his/her narratorial elusiveness: ‘whether I am even a man or a woman’ is ‘as difficult to discover as the longitude’. One need not try to choose between the scandalous, erotic Haywood and the repentant – or slyly subversive – handmaiden of virtue she supposedly became. She is both and she is neither. She is the intelligence behind the various identities circulating through the literary marketplace, a crafty marketer orchestrating an array of brand identities – and she remains like her alter ego the Invisible Spy as difficult to discover as the longitude.

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Haywood has many stand-ins in her work and they all deserve analysis, but the most richly suggestive with respect to the ambiguities of authorial identity is surely Explorabilis. In the frame story he is given two gifts, and they are precisely the gifts a woman with decades of experience reflecting upon contemporary public life might imagine for herself. The first is a tablet that functions as both a tape recorder and a microphone of the sort that could be used as a ‘bug’ for eavesdropping: this ‘wonderful tablet’ transcribes everything said within the space of nine yards, even at the level of a whisper, and it is imagined in terms of the technology available to Haywood: the book. It consists of a thin transparent sheet, ‘glassy’ but ‘malleable’ – it sounds a bit like plastic – capable of being doubled into many foldings, like the sheets of the hand-pressed book.10 This futuristically conceived mike-and-recorder is fascinating in itself, and even more so when we realize that it seems also to anticipate the iPad, and we are reminded anew of the vigour of Haywood’s imagination. Haywood characteristically links the tablet to her preoccupation with the ‘difference of sexes’, to use her own phrase in this narrative. We learn that the tablet, once ‘engrav’d’, can be erased only by the breath of a virgin, and not just any virgin. She must be at least thirteen and so unmarked by experience, of so blankly delicate a mind, that she has no perception of gender difference. The question posed by the narrative – whether such hyper-purity can be preserved from knowledge of sexual difference – receives the predictable answer, no, nor should it. It almost seems as if Haywood is talking forward to Dr Gregory and other conduct book writers who later in the century would praise ‘Virgin purity’ as being of such ‘delicate nature, that it cannot hear certain things without contamination’.11 But for a while, through the most unnatural of educations, this girl is kept uncontaminated. This requires imprisonment with an old woman in a garret room, sleep deprivation and a sparse diet, and it all falls apart when a glimpse of a young man triggers a sexual fantasy. This creepy scenario forces reflection upon an ideal of femininity so perverse that it requires complete separation from the world; it also invites reflections upon the meaning of a kind of literary productivity so distant from the imperatives of female bodily existence that it requires repression of female sexuality and, indeed, the denial of all forms of pleasurable sensuous experience. These lead to consideration of related themes that, while not unique to Haywood, take especially thought-provoking forms in The Invisible Spy: the ambiguous interplay of sexual virtue and artistic creativity, the promise and danger of new technologies of writing and the apparently inborn nature of heterosexuality – if in this way we want to read the girl’s fantasy-induced reversion to her ‘natural’ hetero-desiring state. No less interesting is the belt of invisibility worn by the narrator. It connects quite closely with the curiosity theme important from the start of Haywood’s writing life – her career-launching Love in Excess, it will be recalled, was subtitled The Fatal Curiosity. The narrator, like Justicia in an earlier ‘spy’, A Spy on the

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Conjurer, is by nature inquisitive, intrusive – endowed with ‘the most insatiable curiosity of knowing all that can be known’; a trespasser, voyeur.12 This male spy slips in and out of public and private places, able to mingle unseen among the company in spaces occupied by men including the ‘great coffee-houses’ that offer ‘the world in miniature’.13 But he is equally able to penetrate women’s most intimate spaces: his ‘chief delight’, he reveals, ‘is in the drawing-room of some celebrated toasts, whence I often steal into their bed-chambers’.14 To some extent Haywood is working out of the secret history tradition. The invisible narrator is a well-known political trope, used by Manley in the New Atalantis and Bolingbroke in The Craftsman, among others, and Haywood used it to construct a narrative that makes public, in the words of one of the first reviewers, ‘the family-secrets of all kinds of people’ ‘upon the plan of Atalantis’.15 But Haywood’s narrative is more novelistic than Manley’s and is very much taken up with life in the metropolis in a specific moment in the run-up to the election of 1754, at a time when the Jew Bill, the Marriage Act, the execution of the Jacobite Dr Cameron and the speculation swirling around Elizabeth Canning made much noise in London.16 We are given fascinating glimpses of Haywood’s London including, perhaps, her own personal haunts. A man falls in love at first sight in ‘Jolliffe’s shop’: John Joliffe was one of the trade personnel who was deposed in the affair of the Goring pamphlet in 1749.17 Many of the stories are set in scenes of middling life and concerned with the goings-on of ordinary men and women of the middling station or lower, while some occur outside the metropolis, like the story of the Lancashire countrywoman who, with her soldier husband, makes nonsense of an officer’s attempt to seduce her. The perspective of Explorabilis is male, metropolitan, and knowing: he treats ironically a country squire bemused by the sophisticated information exchanges conducted by the habitués of London coffee house: ‘how [the squire] stares, and gapes with his mouth wide open as if he would swallow all he hears’.18 There are several digs at Henry Fielding, especially in connection with the Canning affair, viewed by Explorabilis as a ‘heap of wild absurdities’.19 (As a magistrate, Fielding ruled on behalf of Canning and eventually published a defence of his reasoning.) Haywood treats it all with great irony: the ‘romantic’ story suited Fielding’s taste, offering ‘a proper subject to work up into a Farce or Puppet-shew’.20 The falling out with Fielding, whatever its causes, persisted until his death. He died a month before The Invisible Spy was published. If more openly topical and less allegorized than Memoirs of a Certain Island and if more obviously in close contact with life as lived in a particular moment, The Invisible Spy shares with its scandal-chronicle predecessor a preoccupation with bringing to light grievances that cannot be redressed by law or remedied through established legal channels. Backscheider makes this point when she remarks of a character in The Invisible Spy that when ‘lawyers, moral suasion, money and appeals for pity fail Alinda, the narrator becomes the instrument

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of discovery and punishment’.21 Haywood’s scandal fiction has received nothing like the attention it deserves. Memoirs of a Certain Island from the mid-1720s and The Invisible Spy from the mid-1750s are two of the most interesting works in the corpus, and they are grossly underexplored. Often said to look back to Manley’s New Atalantis, they do so only superficially. For all their seeming generic affinities with aristocratically oriented, satiric, Tory exposés of the wrongdoing of the rich and powerful, these chronicles actually give scandal a modernizing turn. Haywood takes the classical satiric impulse to expose folly, vice, knavery, corruption and in effect ‘tabloidizes’ it, serving up age-old human misbehaviour with a mixture of moral outrage, sex, and sensationalism that has much in common with today’s tabloid exposure of wrongdoing in the private spaces of public people. Her scandal chronicles also have affinities with ‘citizen journalism’ so called in our own time. The animating impulse seems to be much the same: to tell the stories ignored by power – stories of injustice, exploitation of the vulnerable and the weak, and the failures of law to protect. They might usefully be compared with television detective fiction – not because the scandal fictions are ‘whodunits’ or crime-scene analyses or police procedurals, obviously, but because their basic appeal is to an outraged sense of justice. She brings secrets out of the shadows and in the process writes into literature lives that previously had not seemed worthy of recording. Insufficient attention has been paid to Haywood’s representations of lies, secrecy and hidden lives and to her imaginative attention to a cluster of closely related Enlightenment themes: scepticism, credulity, collective delusion on the part of an easily infatuated public, the power of print to represent and misrepresent. She writes with post-Lockean fascination about problems of knowledge. Storylines turning upon trespass, keyholes, eavesdropping, intrusive curiosity and invisibility that take the reader into places and spaces heretofore considered out-of-bounds go beyond simple indulgence in scandal. They express an Enlightenment preoccupation with the meaning of knowledge and, more specifically, they explore anxieties about the activities of the political press at a time when, as Robert Harris puts it, it was no longer possible to prevent the ‘intrusion of the press into most aspects of politics’ or to curtail ‘its willingness to trespass on subjects allegedly outside its competence’.22 Like Defoe, she created fictions of modernity that highlight risk-taking, restlessness, novelty-seeking, the will to know and the willingness to disobey – themes visible with special clarity in her retelling of the story of Eve in the garden in Eovaai. The day is coming, I would guess, when the Enlightenment themes will elicit from a new generation of readers much the same kind of rapt attention that has been given to her sexand-gender themes. I foresee as well new directions in the media-culture themes now emerging. Haywood anticipated and indeed, for better or worse, helped to create the celebrity-driven, voyeuristic, intrusive, sensationalistic, sex-obsessed,

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men-are-from-Mars-and-women-are-from-Venus media culture that we live with nowadays. Add to this her almost postmodern fascination with the plasticity of sexuality as well as her distinctive take on the delusions of heterosexual love and the strange appeal of stalking your abusive lover, and I think it is safe to say that existing criticism has barely touched upon the richness of what Haywood has to offer readers today. Revisionist political historians over the past few decades have sought to break down the old Namierite emphasis on the dynamics of the family-based ruling elite and its assumption that ‘low’ politics was separate from and, as one historian has phrased it, a ‘pallid reflection’ of ‘high’ politics. Harris reminds us that high politics, so called, ‘was never hermetically sealed off from low, or popular, politics’; rather, ‘the two spheres of politics – both of which possessed its own dynamic – overlapped and interacted at many points’ as part of a two-way relationship.23 Revisionist histories (literary as well as political) now approach politics from below from various angles, enabled by the perspectives supplied by public sphere theorists and cultural historians of various stripes that seek out non-elite voices. In 1989 Nicholas Rogers summarized an already well-established revisionist political history which featured ‘renewed concern with political argument and ideology and a new sensitivity to the diverse modes of communication and redress which signalled the presence of a lively extra-parliamentary public.’24 Investigation of the nature and role of that extra-parliamentary public includes studies of women’s contribution to British political life in important work by Margaret Ezell, Paula McDowell and others who have taught us to look ‘below’ by redirecting attention to non-elite women who sought to make themselves heard and felt through religio-political polemical writings; illuminating studies, many inspired by Paul Monod and Murray Pittock, of a Jacobite culture congenial to participation by women; and examinations of other kinds of political pressures from ‘below’ and ‘outside’ (crowds, the underclass, men drinking in taverns; provincial demonstrations and assemblies; the City merchants; the Westminster Electors and so on). The historiography of a politics from below and outside is rich and growing, and Haywood features in none of it. Haywood’s invisibility to modern political historians will not be easily remedied. Her reputation as a racy novelist hardly flags her as a valuable political source, and there is little existing work that attends to the specificities of her political engagements in their own rhetorical and discursive contexts. But the problem goes deeper than that. In his groundbreaking account of the emergence of a political opposition, Foord offers a picture of the ‘gentlemanly’ nature of oppositional politics in the eighteenth century. The uncoordinated activities of opposition politicians occurred to some degree outside the domain of what we now call the public sphere of critical opinion. ‘Their only organizational frame-

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work’, he observes, ‘was the structure of their society, the customs and habits of the gentleman’s world’.25 They met at social gatherings at the Prince’s townhouse or their own townhouses; they mingled with their gentlemanly kind in coffee shops and taverns; they visited one another at country estates. Where does this leave an Eliza Haywood? Foord identifies three layers of literary or journalistic production on the propaganda side of the opposition. The first consisted of prominent literary figures whose names are still storied (Pope, Gay, Fielding, Thomson); the second of the ‘lordly pens’ who produced papers and pamphlets (Bolingbroke, Pulteney, Chesterfield, Lyttleton – and today we would want to add Lady Mary Wortley Montagu). The (mostly) men in these categories led documented lives and their work is, for the most part, known and studied. But well beneath the lordly pens and the literary giants whom they befriended were the writers by profession working ‘out of doors’ and largely in the shadows: in Foord’s phrase, ‘their hirelings from Grub St’.26 It is to this group that Haywood belongs, and that we see flashes of the Grub Street hireling now and then is owing largely to the literary celebrity and public visibility that she achieved for other reasons. How many other shadowed female political journalists were there, we must wonder. In the Haywood story the flashes of recognition are not many, but by their light we are able to descry connections with men at the highest levels of the parliamentary opposition, with Dodington and Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, for instance, and we sense ties with other ‘names’ as well, perhaps going as high as the Prince of Wales. But a female hireling leaves few traces outside her own writings and even there these traces can be faint. It will require painstaking historical work to reconstruct in a convincing way her impact on her own political world. But patterns emerging from this biography suggest some ways to put Haywood on the political map. One which I will advance by way of conclusion is to investigate how she used her cover as a ‘female spectator’ or ‘lady’ epistolist to penetrate the political nation by way of ‘female’ and therefore under-exploited entry points. Accounts of information exchange within the public sphere in the eighteenth century emphasize oral and print exchange within certain well-known masculine entry points and relay circuits: the press – especially papers and pamphlets, coffee houses, taverns, clubs, gambling dens, pamphlet shops and even brothels. It is recognized that political pamphlets were read and in some cases published by women and distributed by a largely female cadre of trade personnel known as ‘hawkers’, but students of the period generally assume that newspapers and pamphlets, unless specifically attributed to a woman, were written by men. Political papers are male, romances are female. The tea table, when it appears, is associated with gossip, tittle-tattle and all things feminine. As a result of these deeply entrenched habits of thought, works by women that address themselves to women, The Female Spectator and Epistles for the Ladies most obviously, are

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invisible to political historians. In this regard the gender binary, under assault from so many directions, remains unchallenged. The example of Haywood may enable us to bring women’s political contributions into clearer focus. In The Invisible Spy, Haywood creates a gender-ambiguous narrator who enters taverns and coffee houses where he interacts with men who gather there to drink and exchange news. His ability to mingle with coffee-house politicians might be read as a woman’s fantasy of public-sphere inclusion, but in fact Haywood’s work did evidently circulate through discourse communities stereotyped as masculine. Haywood is fascinated in her late works with figures who escape the confines of gender, and some of her most memorable characters are compelling precisely because they stand outside or apart from the zone of intimate male-female relations: the Female Spectator, the Parrot, Astrea, the Invisible Spy, all move through a gender-ambiguous zone with no visible othersex attachments. In subtle ways figures such as these may have served to activate new relays and circuits in the political communication system of mid-century Britain. The parlour, the tea table, the conversational circle, the ‘lucubrations’ of a group of female spectators who gather around a writing table and, finally, the elite networks of epistolary exchange among the Jacobite ladies: all suggest new modes of public-sphere communication that map closely onto what some would regard as feminine counter-culture. Haywood is the slyest of feminists, and we have only begun to take her measure.

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NOTES

Biographical Prolegomenon 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

For EH’s death and burial, see D. M. Walmsey, ‘Eliza Haywood: A Bicentenary’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1956, p. 117. D. E. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House; or an Historical Account of all the Dramatic Writers (and their Works) that have Appeared in Great Britain and Ireland … in the Form of a Dictionary (London, 1764), vol. 2, s.v. Eliza ‘Heywood’. The obituary notice first appeared in WEP, 26 February 1756, and was picked up by LEP (26–8 February), Daily Gazetteer (27 February), and Public Advertiser (27 February). Death notices have been located in two monthlies, The London Magazine: Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer and The Scots Magazine. All derive from the WEP notice. Her place of residence is given in ODNB and elsewhere as New Peter Street, St Margaret’s Parish, Westminster, but P. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004), p. 274, convincingly refutes the New Peter St. address. He has her residing at at 2 Cowley St., but the evidence he provides is unsatisfactory; see note 15 below. Her final residence remains unknown. BL Add. MS 4293, f. 82. The undated letter is reprinted with commentary in G. M. Firmager, ‘Eliza Haywood: Some Further Light on her Background?’, N&Q, 38 ( June 1991), pp. 181–3, on p. 181. She dates the letter to 1721 but the reference to the ‘indifferent success this Tragedy met with’, alluding almost certainly to the failure of Frederick Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh, places it closer to March 1729. P. R. Backscheider, ‘Haywood [née Fowler], Eliza (1693?–1756)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edition, Sept 2010. The ODNB entry by Backscheider has her ‘probably born in Shropshire, part of the Fowler family of Harnage Grange’ but no documentary support is offered. C. Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood’, in A. Pettit (ed.), Selected Works of Eliza Haywood, 6 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000–1), set I, vol. 1, pp. xxii–xxiv. G. F. Whicher, The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915), p. 2; J. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p.11. W. S. Clark, The Early Irish Stage: The Beginnings to 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 149. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 639–40, records the possibility that the history of Roxana Termagant as told by Bonnell Thornton in Have at You All: or, The Drury-Lane Journal (1752) No. 2, 23 January 1752, is meant to recall Haywood’s, she being alluded to, on p. 29, as ‘that prolific inexhaustible authoress, who has lately oblig’d – 203 –

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10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

Notes to pages xii–2 us with the history of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’. Termagant’s husband is a strolling player who is murdered. It is hard to believe such a sensational story, if based in actuality, would not have made its way into other sources, although it is worth noting that Savage in R. Savage, An Author to be Lett (London: A Moore, 1729) refers to her past as a strolling player. The gap in the Smock Alley records allows for the possibility. C. Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity’, SEL, 31:3 (1991), pp. 538– 9. ODNB follows Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity’, p. 540 although n. 28 on p. 549 acknowledges the ‘point is not proved’. BL Add. MS 4293, f. 82. See note 4 above for dating. BL Add. MS 4293, f. 81. The undated letter is reprinted with commentary in Firmager, ‘Eliza Haywood: Some Further Light’, p. 182. I date it to around to around 15 April 1728 when a similar letter was sent to Lady Henrietta Harley, Countess of Oxford, for which see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 166. M. Mack, The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark, Del: University of Delaware Press, 1984), p. 141. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 274, says ‘it is clear’ from poor rate books that Haywood resided at 2 Cowley St. in St Margaret’s Parish in Westminster at the time of her death and that ‘her descendants’ continued to occupy the house until 1788. He does not present his evidence, however, referring the reader instead to an unpublished paper delivered at Monash University April 2000, and my attempts to duplicate his results in the St Margaret’s rate books were unsuccessful. In fact, I am not convinced she ever resided at the Cowley St. address. According to the St John’s ward rate books in the Westminster City Archives, someone named Haywood or Hayward took occupancy of 2 Cowley St. in 1753, but in the absence of a first name, title (e.g. Mrs), or status designation (e.g. widow), the surname alone does not inspire confidence that this is our Eliza Haywood. After her death in 1756 and until at least 1758, the rates continued to be paid by someone named ‘Hayward’. National Archives, SP 36/112, f.24; reprinted in Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 755–6. The arrest was first mentioned by T. Lockwood in ‘Eliza Haywood in 1749: Dalinda, and her Pamphlet on the Pretender’, N&Q, n.s 36 (Dec. 1989), pp. 475– 7. The depositions were first discussed in C. Ingrassia, ‘Additional Information about Eliza Haywood’s 1749 Arrest for Seditious Libel’, N&Q, n.s. 44 ( June 1997), pp. 202–4. The depositions in connection with Haywood’s arrest in Dec. 1749 for seditious libel can be seen in the State Papers in the National Archives at Kew and are reprinted along with additional materials in Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 749–58.

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 5. Whicher, The Life and Romances, p. 1. Ibid., p. 2. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v. ‘Heywood’. See, for example, the Haywood chapter in W. and C. Jerrold, Five Queer Women (New York: Brentano’s Ltd., 1929). P. R. Backscheider, ‘The Shadow of an Author: Eliza Haywood’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 11:1 (1998), 79–101, p. 89.

Notes to pages 3–10 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

205

Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity’, pp. 535–52; Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood’, pp. xxi–lxxxii. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 15. L. Orr, ‘The Basis for Attribution in the Canon of Eliza Haywood’, The Library, 7th series, 12:4 (2011), pp. 335–75. J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), p. 114. Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity’, p. 535. M. C. Battestin with R. R. Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 84. DNB, s.v. Haywood. Jonathan Swift is often named as another of her enemies, but his detractions were restricted to the professional side: in a letter to the Countess of Suffolk, dated 26 Oct. 1731, he referred to her as ‘a stupid, infamous, scribbling woman’; in J. Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Williams, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–5), vol. 3, p. 501. Corinna (1728), his satire on women writers, is so generalized that there is little reason to be confident that he has Haywood in mind when he describes Corinna as ‘half whore, half wife; / Cuckolds, elopes, and runs in debt; / Turns authoress, and is Curll’s for life’, although the satire does end with a reference to ‘the New Utopia’, that is, Memoirs of a Certain Island. Haywood wrote for Curll only once, so far as we know, but Pope’s ‘Eliza’ was led off by him in Dunciad, Book 2, ll. 185–89; see A. Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. V. Rumbold (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999), pp. 176–7. See Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity’, p. 549, n. 28; Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood’, p. xxxix. For a refutation, see K. R. King, ‘Eliza Haywood, Savage Love, and Biographical Uncertainty’, RES, n.s. 59: 242 (2007), pp. 722–39. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v. ‘Heywood’. R. Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 156. A. S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 170. J. Merrit, Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectators (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 5. R. Harris, ‘The London Evening Post and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Politics’, English Historical Review, 110:439 (1995), pp. 1132–56, on. p. 1139. M. Peters, Pitt and Popularity: The Patriot Minister and London Opinion during the Seven Years’ War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 9, describes City Toryism as ‘a strident independent popular variety’ that was ‘often outspokenly anti-Hanoverian and sometimes explicitly Jacobite’. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 33. R. W. Kenny, ‘James Ralph: An Eighteenth-Century Philadelphian in Grub Street’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (April 1940), pp. 218–242, on p. 232. He quotes MR in support of this contention. J. Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade, Stated (London: R. Griffiths, 1758), p. 19. Ibid., pp. 30–1, which continues: ‘While, therefore, these occasional Connections hold, while he is useful in collecting the Materials of Opposition, and in working up

206

Notes to pages 10–20

the whole Mass to a Head, Hope sweetens all his Labours, all his Difficulties, all his Discouragements, and he at least enjoys the Dream, of growing serviceable to himself and his Country together’. 25. D. Oakleaf, ‘Haywood in a “Scrutinizing Age”’, Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 39:1 (2006), p. 18.

1 ‘Her Approach to Fame’: 1714–29 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

W. B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), p. 111. Backscheider, ‘The Shadow of an Author’, p. 89. The phrase is from Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v. ‘Heywood’. S. Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 172. Clark, The Early Irish Stage, p. 149, gives her age as 21, stating without documentation that she ‘decided to try the stage as a means of livelihood’ after being ‘abandoned by her husband’. He is probably extrapolating from Sydney Lee’s 1891 DNB entry (S. Lee, ‘Eliza Haywood’, in Dictionary of National Biography, eds L. Stephen and S. Lee (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1891), vol. 25, pp. 313–15. Theatricality is present in the lines and more profoundly in the way Haywood imagines her key scenes as if staged for a viewer: see, e.g., the final scene of Part 2 of Love in Excess. For a brief overview of theatrical elements, see C. Ingrassia, “‘The Stage Not Answering My Expectations”; The Case of Eliza Haywood’, in B. Nelson and C. Burroughs (eds), Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (New York: Modern Language Association, 2010), pp. 213–22. Clark, The Early Irish Stage, pp. 149–50. E. L. Avery, The London Stage, 1660–1800. A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces: Part 2 (1700–1729) (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), vol. 1, part 2, p. 446. ODNB, s.v., Thomas Elrington. J. Banks, The Unhappy Favourite: or, the Earl of Essex (London: R. Wellington, 1712), p. 1. See Avery, The London Stage, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 731–2. Daily Post, 10 August 1723: ‘And on the Occasion of the Indisposition of one of the Actresses, she intends to perform the Principal Women’s Character herself. If we may judge by her writings we may reasonably expect she will bid fair to entertain the Town very agreeable’: quoted in P. H. Highfill, K. A. Burnim, and E. A. Langhans (eds), A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), vol. 7, p. 222. Prologue, E. Haywood, A Wife to be Lett: a comedy (London: Browne and Chapman, 1724), p. v; italics reversed. Mist’s Weekly Journal, 6 November 1725. J. R. Elwood, ‘The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood’, Theatre Survey, 5 (1964), pp. 107–16, on p. 109, was the first to suggest Haywood may have planted the notice herself. S. Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1600–1765 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 58.

Notes to pages 20–3

207

16. R. Savage, The Authors of the Town; A Satire (London: J. Roberts, 1725), p. 10. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v., ‘Heywood’. 17. The earliest reference to the tradition of bastard children is the 1891 DNB entry where it is attributed to Curll’s Key to the Dunciad (1728), p. 12. There is no documentary basis for the ODNB claim that Savage and Haywood lived together ‘for a few years’ in the early 1720s. It seems to have originated in Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood’, p. xxxv, where it is asserted with no evidence beyond the circumstance that Savage has no known address during the period from 1720 to 1724. 18. See King, ‘Eliza Haywood, Savage Love’. 19. R. Savage, ‘To Mrs. Eliza Haywood, on Her Novel, call’d The Rash Resolve’ (1724) in E. Haywood, The Rash Resolve: Or, The Untimely Discovery. A Novel (London: D. Browne and S. Chapman, 1724), p. x. 20. Clark, The Early Irish Stage, p. 155. 21. Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, s.v. Chetwood, reports but doubts the claim in the London Stage that Chetwood was associated with Lincoln’s Inn during the 1718–19 season. 22. Bookseller’s dedication, E. Haywood, Love in Excess: or the fatal enquiry, a novel (London: Chetwood, 1719–20), p. ii; italics reversed. 23. Chetwood revealed Savage’s authorship in W. R. Chetwood, A General History of the Stage (London, 1749), p. 177. For Savage’s Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Theophilus Keene (1718), see C. Tracy, The Artificial Bastard: A Biography of Richard Savage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 42. 24. See Tracy, The Artificial Bastard, pp. 45–8. 25. They shared an admiration for the Jacobite George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, to whom Savage dedicated Love in a Veil (1718) and from whose work Haywood took the line used as motto for Love in Excess. 26. R. Holmes, Dr Johnson & Mr Savage (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993), p. 69. See also the discussion of ‘Pastoral Dialogue’ in King, ‘Eliza Haywood, Savage Love’, pp. 730–1. 27. J. Brereton, ‘Epistle to Mrs. Anne Griffiths. Written from London, in 1718’, in Poems on Several Occasions: by Mrs Jane Brereton (London: Cave, 1744), p. 35. If the 1718 date can be relied upon, this would be the first surviving response to Haywood’s work outside the Hillarian circle. 28. The reference to ‘the Novel kind of Writing’ is from Baker, The Companion to the PlayHouse, s.v. ‘Heywood’. 29. The letter, dated 5 August 1720, is in National Archives, SP 35/22, f. 108. See Firmager, ‘Eliza Haywood: Some Further Light’ for a full transcript; see also Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 99–100. 30. W. R. Chetwood, A General History of the Stage, from its origin in Greece down to the present time (London: W. Owen, 1749), p. 57. This is not to claim that Love in Excess was Haywood’s most popular or most commercially successful work. Spedding has shown that the failure to distinguish ‘issues’ from ‘editions’ led an earlier phase of scholarship to the mistaken conclusion that Love in Excess was “‘sensationally” and “phenomenally” popular’ and ‘“one of the great best-sellers of the eighteenth century”’ when it was ‘no such thing’: see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 19. Love in Excess ranks seventh in sales in the appendix on p. 775. 31. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v., ‘Heywood’.

208

Notes to pages 23–7

32. P. Aubin, The Life of Charlotta du Pont, an English lady (London: Bettesworth, 1723), preface, p. vi. 33. G. G. Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004), pp. 61–6. 34. James Sterling’s ‘To Mrs. Eliza Haywood, on her Writings’ first appeared in vol. 1 of E. Haywood, Secret Histories, Novels and Poems, 4 vols (London: Browne and Chapman, 1725), n.p., at the front of Love in Excess; italics reversed. 35. Savage, ‘To Mrs. Eliz. Haywood, on her Novel Call’d Love in Excess, &c.’ in Haywood, Love in Excess, Part the second, n.p.; italics reversed. 36. Chetwood, A General History, p. 57. 37. See, e.g., ODNB entry. The speculation entered accounts of the life quietly in a footnote in Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Romance of Obscurity, p. 549, n. 28, and was advanced more boldly in the main text in Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood’, p. xxxix, and has been repeated in virtually every subsequent account. 38. T. Bowers, ‘Collusive Resistance: Sexual Agency and Partisan Politics in Love in Excess, in K. T. Saxton and R. P. Bocchicchio (eds), The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 48–68; M. Kvande, ‘The Outsider Narrator in Eliza Haywood’s Political Novels’, SEL, 43:3 (2003), pp. 625–43; M. Mowry, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Defense of London’s Body Politic’, SEL, 43:3 (2003), pp. 645–55. The apolitical view is stated with stark clarity by J. J. Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700–1780 (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 48: her fiction registers ‘the effacement of the public realm and the restriction of amatory narrative to private, personal, and secret transactions’. For a challenge to the ‘Tory feminist’ view, see E. Kubek, ‘The Key to Stowe: Toward a Patriot Whig Reading of Eliza Haywood’s Eovaai’, in C. Mounsey (ed.), Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated Presses, 2001), pp. 225–54. 39. Ballaster, Seductive Forms, p. 156. 40. Bowers, ‘Collusive Resistance’, p. 48. This claim is softened in Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), where Bowers is at pains to distinguish lower-case ‘tory’ sensibility (‘a more amorphous matter of values, attitudes, and default assumptions’) from Tory partisanship: see, e.g., p. 5. My own interest, of course, is in Haywood’s partisanship, which I see as embracing a range of shifting political positions. 41. I owe this observation to Robert Markley. 42. D. Campbell, Secret Memoirs of the late Mr Duncan Campbel, the famous deaf and dumb gentleman (London: J. Millan and J. Chrichley, 1732), p. 131; Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 143. 43. See C. Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 76. 44. E. Haywood, The Surprize; or constancy rewarded. (London: J. Roberts, 1724), p. vii; italics reversed. 45. P. K. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 32. 46. J. Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. 111, 116. 47. P. R. Backscheider (ed.), Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xvii, n. 4.

Notes to pages 27–33

209

48. J. A. Downie, ‘Walpole, “the Poet’s Foe”’, in J. Black (ed.), Britain in the Age of Walpole (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), pp. 171–88, on pp. 173–4. 49. Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. V. Rumbold, pp. 171–2. 50. D. Oakleaf (ed.), Love in Excess; or, The Fatal Enquiry, 2nd edn (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2000), p. 269. 51. V. Rumbold, ‘Cut the Caterwauling: Women Writers (Not) in Pope’s Dunciads’, RES, n.s. 52: 208 (2001), pp. 524–39. 52. This account of the Hill circle is indebted to Gerrard’s careful reconstruction of the dynamics of the group in Aaron Hill, chapters 3 and 4. For Sansom, see M. F. Sansom, Clio: The Autobiography of Martha Fowke Sansom (1687–1736), ed. P. K. Guskin (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1997), especially pp. 28–31. See also K. R. King, ‘New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719–1725’, in P. R. Backscheider and C. Ingrassia, A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), pp. 261–75. 53. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, pp. 94, 95. 54. Sansom, Clio, ed. Guskin, p. 82. 55. Quoted in Gerrard, Aaron Hill, p. 95. 56. Orr, ‘The Basis for Attribution’, p. 350. 57. R. Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 164. 58. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, pp. 62, 63. 59. E. Haywood, dedication, The Fair Captive (London: Jauncy and Cole, 1721), p. ix. On this ‘bare hint’, the Jerrolds speculate that ‘she may have been under the protection of the first Viscount Gage’: see Jerrold, Five Queer Women, p. 214. 60. E. Haywood, The Fair Captive, p. xi. The Spedding quote is from the headnote to Letters from a Lady of Quality in which is detected in the earliest works an ‘aristocratic disdain for writing popular works [that] soon deserted her’; see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 100. 61. Ibid., p. xi. 62. Seven poems are preserved in the 16-page Poems on Several Occasions included at the end of vol. 4 of E. Haywood, Works of Mrs Eliza Haywood, 4 vols (London: Browne and Chapman, 1724). 63. See ‘A Pastoral Dialogue, between Alexis and Clorinda’, subtitled ‘Occasioned by Hillarius’s intending a Voyage to America’, alluding to Hill’s plans to voyage to America in 1718 or 1719 in Works, I, 1, pp. 39–43; for the dating see p. 265, n. 1. 64. ‘To Mr. Walter Bowman, Professor of the Mathematicks’, in Haywood, Poems on Several Occasions, p. 2. 65. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, p. 70. 66. Haywood, Poems on Several Occasions, p. 4. 67. E. Haywood, The Fortunate Foundlings: being the genuine history of Colonel M—rs, and his sister, Madame du P—y (London: Gardner, 1744), p. 8. 68. E. Haywood, The Tea-Table: Or, A conversation between some Polite Persons of both Sexes, at a Lady’s Visiting Day, Works, I, 1, p. 10. 69. Ibid., part 2, p. 49. 70. Savage, The Authors of the Town, p. 10. 71. Haywood, The Tea-Table, Works, II, 1, p. 50. 72. Ibid., part 1, pp. 17–31. 73. This calculation is based upon numbers of editions: La Belle Assemblée went through 9–11 editions over a 41-year period; see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 775.

210

Notes to pages 33–7

74. M. C. Croskery, ‘Who’s Afraid of Eliza Haywood?’, Literature Compass 4:4 (2007), pp. 967–980, 10.1111/j.1741–4113.2007.00455.x, on p. 970. 75. E. Haywood, dedication to Memoirs of Baron de Brosse Who was Broke on the Wheel In the Reign of Lewis XIV (London: Browne and Chapman, 1725), pp. v, iv. The dedicatee is the Earl of Scarsdale.

2 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent To Utopia 1. 2.

Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing, p. 172. For the publication history see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 209–10. Part 2 has not been reprinted; Part 1 is available in a Garland facsimile published 1972. For rape scenes, see the story of Bertoldus, identified in the key as Lord H-----t and expanded by an unknown hand to ‘Herbert’, and the gang rape of a virgin by a ‘Triumvirate of Libertines’, in E. Haywood, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, 2 vols (London, 1724–5), part 2, pp. 126–40, 246–7; hereafter Memoirs. 3. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially Chapters 13 and 14. He does not refer to Haywood, but she fits clearly within the ‘Augustan mind’ of his analysis: ‘Their thought was Machiavellian in its recognition that society was being cut loose from natural order’; quote on p. 458. 4. Kvande, ‘The Outsider Narrator’, p. 628. 5. J. C. Beasley, ‘Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early Prose Fiction’ ECS, 14:4 (1981), pp. 406–31, on p. 423: EH’s ‘indictment of Walpole as a mortal enemy to the public welfare is as complete and as savage as anything to be found in the Opposition press’. 6. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, p. 244. 7. J. J. Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns: 1700–1739 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 155: EH uses the ‘polemical conventions of Tory propaganda’ used by Manley but without her predecessor’s ‘political commitment’; for quotes see pp. 155, 156. 8. Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, p. 168. 9. For the new economic order see Carswell, The South Sea Bubble; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967). The literary response is examined by C. Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), but Haywood receives no mention. For Haywood in relation to financial themes, see C. Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), p. 262. 10. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 277. 11. The anti-Walpole hypothesis requires explaining away the panegyric to Cleomenes (Part 1) and praise of the creation of the Knights of the Bath (Part 2). In order to support an ironic reading R. Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition: Eliza Haywood’s Scandal Fiction’, in Kirsten T. Saxton and Rebecca P. Bocchicchio (eds), The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 152, quotes Margaret Rose’s opinion that the Cleomenes portrait is a ‘paradoxical encomium’ that ‘ironically treats each of Walpole’s vices through extolling their

Notes to pages 37–40

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

211

opposites’; see M. Rose, Political Satire and Reforming Vision in Eliza Haywood’s Works (Milano: Europrint Publications, 1996), p. 42. Rose argues that Cleomenes/Walpole exists within a ‘climate of mockery’. See J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 79. Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World, p. 116. D. Griffin, Literary Patronage in England, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6. Quoted in Downie, ‘Walpole, “the Poet’s Foe”’, p. 182. R. D. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre 1728–1737 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 117. See Downie, ‘Walpole, “the Poet’s Foe”’, pp. 180–83. James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674–1744), had family and property connections in Herefordshire and Radnorshire where Haywood appears to have had Fowler relations. As ‘Communus’ he ‘seeks the Distress’d, relieves their Wants with open-handed Bounty, nor waits to be intreated to do good’; he is ‘Kind, liberal, hospitable to all’: see Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 279. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 277. John Campbell, second Duke of Argyle from 1703–1743, was a leader of the opposition in the late Walpole days. Hatchett dedicated his unperformed play The Chinese Orphan to him in 1741. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 258. Lionel Cranfield Sackville, first Duke of Dorset, was appointed Lord Steward on 30 May 1725. Ibid., pp. 266–70; quotes on p. 267. For Dodington and Strawberry, see S. Varey, Introduction, Augustan Reprint Society edition of Bath-Intrigues in Four Letters to a Friend in London (Los Angeles: Clark Library, 1986), pp. vii–viii. The attribution to Haywood has been questioned: see Orr, ‘The Basis for Attribution’, p. 347. Dodington was not always the unprepossessing fat man who can be relied upon these days to produce a scholarly chuckle. Thomas Lockwood has called to my attention a letter from Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, dated 29 December 1741 OS, Corr. 17, pp. 257–8: ‘You know Mr Doddington has lost himself extremely by his new turn, after so often changing sides; he is grown very fat and lethargic; my brother Ned says, He is grown of less consequence, but more weight’. For a hilarious account of patron stalking see T. Lockwood, ‘Subscription-Hunters and Their Prey’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 34:1 (2001), pp. 121–35. C. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 176, 175. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, p. 262, notes the ‘considerable’ ‘insight into the analogous pathologies of exchange value and sexual libertinage’; lust of the flesh (‘the carnal degradation of love’) and lust for money serve as ‘interchangeable signifiers of corruption. The passions of the flesh and the passions of profit-motive are joint symptoms of the depravity of modern times, which consists in the limitless indulgence of human appetite.’ Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 5. Ibid., p. 7. The 1725 Dublin edition identifies Lucitario with ‘Mr W—l—e’: see Rose, Political Satire, p. 41. For Craggs and Blunt, see H. Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 167–203.

212 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

Notes to pages 40–5 Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 7–8. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, p. 206. M. Balen, A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 185. Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, pp. 246, 247. R. Hamowy, Introduction in T. Gordon and J. Trenchard, Cato’s Letters: or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and other Important Subjects, ed. R. Hamowy, 2 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995) p. xxxii. Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 14–33, as ‘The History of Graciana’. Hamowy, Cato’s Letters, p. 55. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 22. Ibid., p. 33. P. Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 2004), p. 153. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 12. Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope, p. 198. For Pope’s favourable image of Blunt, see p. 201. In To Bathurst Pope described him as ‘Much injur’d Blunt!’ asking ‘why bears he Britain’s hate?’ See ll. 136–52. V. Cowles, The Great Swindle: The Story of the South Sea Bubble (London: Collins, 1960), p. 80. G. Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), p. 296, considers in a footnote that Blunt’s wife may have been ‘partly the object of this slander’, but discounts the possibility on the grounds that ‘her name was neither Martha nor “Marthalia”’. Sherburn’s solution to the mismatch is typical: the Marthalia passage is ‘wild enough to be disregarded, but vile enough to outrage the sensibilities of any lover, however Platonic’. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 12. For Gloatitia, see Memoirs, vol. 1, pp. 43–5. Downie, ‘Walpole, “the Poet’s Foe”’, p. 186. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 273. In context her meanings are characteristically Haywoodian: her narrator envisions a world from which love has departed. Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition’, p. 151. Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 6ff. Sansom, Clio, ed. Guskin, p. 29. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 275, p. 276. Richetti, Popular Fiction, pp. 152–3. His judgements are often challenged but continue to prevail in influential quarters. Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing, follows him closely, even replicating his dismissive judgements: see p. 187. It was not reprinted beyond a second London edition in 1726. Spedding reports in Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 207, that ‘Curiosity about the authorship [of Memoirs] certainly must have been high’ but presents no evidence. Its notoriety seems closely tied to Pope’s reference in Dunciad: see Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. V. Rumbold, pp. 171–2. See R. Herman, The Business of a Woman: The Political Writings of Delarivier Manley (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 73, 69. Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 258–9. For recyclings of the Castlehaven story, see C. B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Notes to pages 45–52

213

54. See R. Halsband, Lord Hervey: Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 54. 55. Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 20–4, quote on p. 21. 56. London Journal, 29 May 1725. 57. Sessions Papers are available in a fully searchable edition of The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 at www.oldbaileyonline.org. For the case of the Hester Gregorys, see http:// www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17250827-63-defend362&div=t1725082763#highlight. 58. Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 180–94. 59. Ibid., p. 183. 60. Ibid., pp. 187–9. 61. Ibid., p. 189. 62. Ibid., p. 192. 63. Ibid., p. 193. 64. G. G. Starr, ‘Objects, Imaginings, and Facts: Going beyond Genre in Behn and Defoe’, ECF, 16:4 (2004), pp. 499–518, on p. 510. 65. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 188. 66. Mist’s Weekly Journal, 17 May 1725. Anon., The Case of Orphans Consider’d, from Antiquity (London: for J. Peele, 1725), p. 5, advertised the previous February, reports that the ‘Affair of Orphans, and their Money’ have ‘been of late a reigning Topic of Discourse’. 67. The biographical information in this paragraph is taken from the ODNB entry written by A. A. Hanham, ‘Parker, Thomas, first earl of Macclesfield (1667–1732)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn, September 2010. 68. Anon., The Case of Orphans Consider’d, pp. 5–6. 69. ‘An Epistle from Jack Sheppard to the late L—d Ch—ll—r of E—d, who when Sheppard was try’d, sent for him to the Chancery Bar’. It can be viewed at the BL on Mic. A 19092. 70. Captain C. Johnson, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (London, C. Rivington and J. Lacy, 1724), p. 125. The passage is discussed by H. Turley in Rum, Sodomy and the Lash: Piracy, Sexuality, and Masculine Identity (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), p. 100. 71. G. Wilson, Bribes no Perquisites: Or, the Case of the Earl of Macclesfield. Being Impartial Observations Upon his Lordship’s Tryal (London: for A. More, 1726), pp. 27, 18, 30, 29, 71. 72. Memoirs, vol. 2, pp. 24–39. 73. Ibid, p. 19. 74. Ibid, p. 33. 75. He is thus identified in a handwritten note in BL copy (12613.g.18) on p. 25. Information on Compton taken from ODNB article written by A. A. Hanham. 76. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 25. 77. Ibid., p. 28ff. 78. Ibid., p. 31. 79. Ibid., p. 31. 80. Ibid.; quotes are from pp. 35–7. 81. A. E. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 3. 82. Haywood, Fortunate Foundlings, p. 3. 83. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 33.

214

Notes to pages 52–8

84. D. Manley, Dedication, Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes. From the new Atalantis … 6th edn, 4 vols (London: John Morphew, 1720), vol. 2, pp. v–vi. For discussion, see R. Carnell, A Political Biography of Delarivier Manley (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p. 186. 85. Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 19.

3 Theatrical Thirties: 1729–37 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Renamed A Companion to the Theatre when a second volume was published in 1747. Her assignment of copyright to Cogan and Nourse can be seen in BL Add MS 38,728, f. 112, dated 15 March 1734/5. Her address given is ‘St Margates Westminister’, St Margaret’s parish presumably. The phrase is from Whicher, The Life and Romances, p. 21, who seems to have been the first to speculate that Pope’s abuse silenced her: it ‘seriously damaged her literary reputation. During the next decade she wrote almost nothing’. The silenced-by-Pope hypothesis continues to inform the thinking of even those who largely reject it: Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 168, finds in her continued disinclination to acknowledge her immensely popular La Belle Assemblée ‘striking evidence of Haywood’s aversion to publicity and sensitivity to criticism in the early years’ after the Dunciad attack. Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 61. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, p. viii. Ibid., p. 36. W. Hatchett, An Appeal, to all Lovers of Their Country and Reputation. Occasion’d By a groundless Aspersion cast on William Hatchett, Gent. By Monsieur de Montaud (London: printed by the author, 1731), p. 7. D. E. Baker, Biographica Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Play House … Continued from 1764 to 1782 (London, 1782), s.v. ‘William Hatchet’. E. Haywood, Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh (London: Risk, Ewing and Smith, 1729), preface [n.p.]; italics reversed. Ibid., preface [n.p.]; italics reversed. The penultimate paragraph finds her waxing sarcastic: ‘tho’ I know myself beneath the Censure of the Gyant-Criticks of this Age, yet have I taken all imaginable Care not to offend the Rules they have prescrib’d for Theatrical Entertainments.’ F. Vivian, A Life of Frederick, Prince of Wales, 1707–1751: A Connoisseur of the Arts, ed. Roger White (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), p. 226: ‘Frederick’s financial position, his personal hatred of Walpole and the attitude of his parents, more than political considerations, drove him into alliance with the opposition’ in 1734. He did have a small allowance from the Civil List and additional revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall and sought in the early months to set up a small household; see A. N. Newman, ‘The Political Patronage of Frederick Prince of Wales’, Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 68–75. See also Vivian, Life of Frederick, pp. 102–11. Vivian, Life of Frederick, p. 209. E. A. Wilputte, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh’, SEL, 41:3 (2001), pp. 499–514, on p. 511. Haywood, Frederick, p. A2v, p. A4. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 14.

Notes to pages 58–63

215

16. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 704, for the advertising record. He gives the date of publication as 16 April 1729 on pp. 314, 704, but as 31 January 1729 on p. 208. 17. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 25. Spedding offers a more sympathetic account of Hatchett; see pp. 707–8, 688–9, 724–5 and 785–9, although assertions about Haywood need to be taken with caution. 18. The Daily Post, 7 April 1730, announced: ‘Two of the principal parts to be performed by the Author and Mrs. Eliza Haywood’. 19. M. Heinemann, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Career in the Theatre’, N&Q, n.s. 20:1 (1973), pp. 9–13, on p. 11. 20. Prologue, W. Hatchett, The Rival Father: or, the Death of Achilles. A Tragedy (London: William Mears and Thomas Corbett (1730), italics reversed. 21. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 320. Chetwood, A General History, p. 57, writes: ‘She also joyn’d with Mr. Hatchet, in making Songs to Mr. Fielding’s Tom Thumb which were compos’d by the ingenious Mr. Frederick Lampe, and perform’d often with the Title of the Opera of Operas’. 22. He gave Bryan Dawson twenty-four tickets, twelve box and twelve pit: see W. Hatchett, A Remarkable Cause, on a Note of Hand Try’d in the Court of Conscience, Anno 1741 (London: printed for the author, 1742), p. 8. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 345 rightly comments that it is unclear ‘whether Hatchett gave these away on his own account (as a joint-proprietor) or on Haywood’s (as sole proprietor)’. For the evidence for Haywood’s authorship, see pp. 344–6. 23. For Female Freemason, see C. Howard, ‘A Female Freemason on Stage?: Eliza Haywood’s Patriotism at Henry Fielding’s Haymarket Theatre’, in L. Engel (ed.), The Public’s Open to Us All: Essays on Women and Performance in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), pp. 128–55. The authorship of this after-piece is unknown, but it may have been Haywood or Hatchett or both; it was performed by Haywood for Hatchett’s benefit night, on 25 April 1737. For A Rehearsal of Kings, see T. Lockwood, ‘William Hatchett, A Rehearsal of Kings (1737), and the Panton Street Puppet Show (1748)’, Philological Quarterly, 68 (1989), pp. 315–23. 24. P. Spedding, ‘Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742’, in J. Wallwork and P. Salzman (eds), Women Writing 1550–1750 (Melbourne: Meridian, 2001), pp. 237–51. 25. Whicher, The Life and Romances, p. 9. 26. Lockwood, ‘Eliza Haywood in 1749’, p. 476; see also Lockwood, ‘William Hatchett’, p. 316, p. 321, n. 3. 27. BL Add. MS 4293, f. 82. See n. 4 above, p. 203, for dating. The Hatchett paternity claim is first made in Blouch, ‘Eliza Haywood, p. xxxix. 28. Lockwood, ‘William Hatchett’, p. 321, n. 4. 29. A. Ellis, The Penny Universities: A History of the Coffee-Houses (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), pp. 150–51. 30. Hatchett, An Appeal, pp. 10, 12–13, 27. 31. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 708. 32. Hatchett, A Remarkable Cause, p. 13. 33. Ibid., p. 8. 34. Ibid., p. A2. 35. Ibid., p. 30. 36. Ibid., p. 24. 37. Ibid., p. 30.

216

Notes to pages 63–6

38. Ibid., p. 4. 39. Ibid., p. 17. 40. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 750. In her own deposition, given the next month, Haywood says ‘she has lost her Eye sight about Six months & kept her Bed above two months’: see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 756. 41. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood. He has them travelling summers of 1739 (see p. 696), 1741 (see p. 687), and probably 1740. His accounts of their shared travels are based upon misreadings of the evidence. To take one example, on p. 687, the claim for travels in the summer of 1741 rests entirely on a single phrase from Remarkable Cause, on p. 30, quoted out of context: ‘before we left town last summer’; emphasis mine. He assumes that ‘we’ refers to Haywood, but the phrase is spoken by Hatchett’s invented attorney, ‘Impartial Tenderman’, who employs the convention of speaking of his client using the first person plural. 42. Lockwood, ‘William Hatchett’, p. 317. 43. Hatchett, Remarkable Cause, p. 36. 44. Ibid., p. 29. 45. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 695, dates to 1740 on the basis of its printed date of ‘January 7, 1740’, but I follow Lockwood, ‘William Hatchett’, p. 317, in interpreting this to mean 7 Jan. 1741 in New Style dating. Spedding reports that only one copy of Proposals for Printing by Subscription, The Following Dramatic Pieces. By Mr. Hatchett has survived. It is in the John Johnston Collection at the Bodleian. 46. The discovery, announced by Spedding in ‘Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742’, is summarized in the headnote to The Sopha in Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 372–77; for their relative rates of productivity, see p. 375. 47. C. Tracy (ed.), Life of Savage by Samuel Johnson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 12. 48. V. Woolf, ‘A Scribbling Dame’ [review of Whicher’s The Life and Romances of Eliza Haywood], in Andrew McNellie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2: 1912–1918 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1987), pp. 22–5, on p. 23. 49. R. A. Day, Told in Letters: Epistolary Fiction Before Richardson (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 222, n. 28, speculated that during the 30s she ‘“went into keeping” as Mrs. Manley had done’. 50. Savage, The Authors of the Town, p. 10; the lines read: ‘A Printer’s Drudge! / Flush’d with Success, for Stage-Renown she pants’. In the preface to An Author to be Lett (1729), James Sutherland (ed.), Augustan Reprint Society No. 84 (Los Angeles: Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1960), Savage wrote, again nastily, that she embraced scandal writing having grown ‘too homely for a Strolling Actress’. 51. H. Fielding, Plays, 1728–1737, ed. T. Lockwood, Series: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004–11), vol. 1, p. 187. 52. Heinemann, ‘Eliza Haywood’s Career’, p. 9. Ingrassia, ‘“The Stage Not Answering”’, p. 214, probably exaggerates her success, calling her a ‘competent and recognized actress with considerable experience’ who ‘consistently’ performed from 1714 to 1737; on p. 214. See also K. R. King, ‘Henry and Eliza: Feudlings or Friends?’ in J. A. Downie (ed.), Henry Fielding in Our Time: Papers Presented at the Tercentenary Conference (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008), pp. 215–32, modified portions of which appear in this chapter. 53. M. A. Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 138.

Notes to pages 66–70

217

54. J. R. Elwood, ‘Henry Fielding and Eliza Haywood: A Twenty Year War’, Albion, 5 (1973), pp. 184–192, on p. 186; Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 215. 55. See Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books, ed. V. Rumbold, pp. 171–2. 56. Savage, An Author to be Lett, sigs A2, A5. For Pope, Savage, and Dunciad, see introduction to Richard Savage An Author to be Lett (1720) in J. Sutherland (ed.), An Author to be Lett, pp. i–iv. 57. Fielding, Plays, ed. Lockwood, pp. 263, 273. 58. Haywood, Love in Excess, p. 189. 59. J. Spencer, ‘Fielding and Female Authority’, in C. Rawson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Henry Fielding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 122–36, on p. 129. Spencer’s perceptive account of literary relations between Haywood and Fielding, pp. 128–131, is the best summary treatment of the subject. 60. H. Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Andrew Millar, 1742), vol. 2, p. 4. 61. Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 649, n. 367; see also p. 215. It should be noted that the notice is for Rehearsal of Kings and the troupe may have been managed not by Fielding but by Hatchett. 62. Ibid., p. 215. 63. Elwood, ‘The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood’, p. 112, infers from the paucity of contemporary comment that she lacked ‘sufficient talent as an actress to have had much impact upon the theatre of her day’; K. Shevelow, Charlotte: Being a True Account of an Actress’s Flamboyant Adventures (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), p. 240, describes her as skilful and ‘genuinely talented’ but provides no evidence. 64. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, p. 38. 65. Isaac Reed in ‘Notitia Dramatica’ in the BL; quoted in Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, p. 182. 66. S. Johnson, The Blazing Comet: The Mad Lovers: or, The Beauties of the Poets (London: James Crokatt and Thomas Payne, 1732), p. 6. 67. Ibid., p. 37. 68. Ibid., pp. 33, 49. 69. Ibid., p. 37. 70. Ibid., p. 49. 71. Heinemann, ‘‘Eliza Haywood’s Career’, p. 11. 72. T. Lockwood, ‘Fielding from Stage to Page’, in C. Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding (1707– 1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2008), pp. 21–39, on p. 34. 73. For an overview of the 1736–7 Haymarket season and the political contexts of both plays, see Fielding, Plays, ed. Lockwood, vol. 3, pp. 353–402. For Rehearsal of Kings, see pp. 358–9, p. 369; Egmont is quoted on. p. 385. I am indebted to this edition and its editor for many of the details in this account. 74. But see Fielding, Plays, ed. Lockwood, p. 369, n. 1: Mrs Screen is sometimes ‘identified as Walpole’s mistress Maria Skerret, but with more confidence than I can muster’. 75. H. Fielding, The Historical Register For the Year 1736 … To which is added a very merry Tragedy, called, Eurydice Hiss’d (London: J. Roberts, 1737), pp. 37, 38. 76. Daily Advertiser, 23 May 1737: ‘We hear that her Grace the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough will be at the Theatre in the Hay-Market’. 77. See Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, pp. 244–6.

218

Notes to pages 70–4

78. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 128, draws his information from Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, p. 58. Searches conducted by archivists at the Norwich Record Office in response to my inquiries failed to turn up references to Haywood in the 1737 bills and newspaper advertisements. 79. For a summary of the speculation prompted by this period of silence, the latter ‘widely overestimated and wildly interpreted’, see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 348–9. The first known sign of her reappearance, bibliographically speaking, is the reissue in Nov. 1740 of Eovaai as The Unfortunate Princess with EH’s name on the title-page, although it is not evident that she authorized the reissue: see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 349–50. 80. J. A. Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), p. 107, observes that Fielding ‘contributed nothing to the fund of Opposition propaganda after April 1741’. 81. ‘Thus was a ministry formed, which has been ludicrously styled the Broad Bottom Administration, as comprising a grand coalition of all parties’: see W. Coxe, Memoirs of the Administration of the Right Honourable Henry Pelham, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1829), vol. 1, p. 198. 82. Hume, Henry Fielding and the London Theatre, p. 211 attributes the ‘marked change in Fielding’s outlook evident in his plays of 1736 and 1737’ to the fact, first pointed out by T. R. Cleary in Henry Fielding, Political Writer (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984), that ‘Fielding became political when his school friends Lyttleton and Pitt entered the Commons’. 83. Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding, p. 10. 84. See H. Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal and A Plan of the Universal Register-Office, ed. B. A. Goldgar, Series: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 72; for the trial of B--- T---, see Covent-Garden Journal, no. 15, pp. 109–12. 85. E. Haywood, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 4 vols. (London: Gardner, 1751), vol. 1, pp. 76–7. 86. A. Dobson, ‘Polly Honeycombe’, in Eighteenth Century Vignettes, 3rd series (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896), pp. 83–103, on p. 101; Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 230.

4 Adventures of Eovaai 1.

2.

3. 4. 5.

See E. A. Wilputte, ‘The Textual Architecture of Eliza Haywood’s Adventures of Eovaai’, Essays in Literature, 22 (1995), pp. 31–44; S. Aravamudan, ‘In the Wake of the Novel: The Oriental Tale as National Allegory’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 33:1 (Fall, 1999), pp. 5–31; Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition’, pp. 143–167. For other Hanoverian works of ‘princely myth-making’ that anticipate The Idea of a Patriot King, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, pp. 207–12. Haywood is not mentioned. For the tradition in relation to The Idea of a Patriot King, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, pp. 198–205. Kubek, ‘The Key to Stowe’, pp. 227, 225. F. Harris, A Passion for Government: The Life of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 309. Haywood did not know Churchill: the dedication to Eovaai professes itself to be the work of one ‘entirely unknown’ to ‘your Grace’.

Notes to pages 74–9 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

219

Backscheider, ‘The Shadow of an Author’, pp. 95, 99. She notes, on pp. 98–9, the significance of the fact that Frederick in 1735 commissioned a statue of the Black Prince: ‘he was proud to be the Patriot King celebrated by the Opposition … Parallels to Adelhu are hard to miss’. H. M. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth: A Study of the Ideographic Representation of Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 141. Cf. the Bolingbrokean monarchical ideal in H. Brooke, ‘A Prefatory Dedication’ to Gustavus Vasa (London: J. Buck, 1739), p. v: ‘The Monarch or Head of such a Constitution, is as the Father of a large and well regulated Family, his Subjects are not Servants, but Sons; their Care, their Affections, their Attachments are reciprocal, and their Interest is one, is not to be divided’. D. Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. xviii, xvii. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 69. Cleary, Henry Fielding, Political Writer, pp. 76–7. Cleary misleadingly refers to members of the Stowe group as ‘Broad-Bottom Patriots’; for a critique, see Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding, esp. pp. 61–2, 118–23. This discussion is indebted to B. A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), especially chapter 5, pp. 134–50. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 71. R. Sedgwick (ed.), Lord Hervey’s Memoirs (London: William Kimber, 1952), p. 236. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 192. Sedgwick (ed.), Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, p. 175. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 347. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 121. Verses ‘To the Prince’ contributed by Puff to Grub St Journal, 10 June 1736. ‘An Ode, presented to their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, in Richmond-Gardens, on Thursday last, being the 6th of May’. The ode, published May 8 in the Daily Gazetteer, was picked up in The Old Whig, 13 May 1736, and Weekly Miscellany, 15 May 1736. E. Haywood, Adventures of Eovaai Princess of Ijaveo: A Pre-Adamitical History, ed. E. Wilputte (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999), pp. 64, 160. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 166. Backscheider, ‘The Shadow of an Author’, p. 92, comments on the ‘rarely discussed conclusion’: it is a ‘masterly combination of the familiar beleaguered-princess romance and the political fable’ that reveals ‘the ideal order a good monarch brings to a fortunate nation’. For a metafictional reading, see Aravamudan, ‘In the Wake of the Novel’, p. 24: marriage leads ‘to an imaginative conclusion that is resolutely fictional, and national, but which does not resemble anything like the realist novel’. Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings, p. xi. For an overview of the ‘Country-Party Patriotism’ that sprang in part from Machiavellian corruption theory, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, especially pp. 4–6. Haywood, Eovaai, pp. 97, 102. Ibid., p. 104ff. Ibid., pp. 62, 136. Ibid., p. 100; emphasis mine.

220

Notes to pages 79–85

31. Ibid., p. 104. 32. H. St. John Bolingbroke, The Idea of a Patriot King; with respect to the constitution of Great Britain (London, T. C., 1740), p. 6. 33. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 97. 34. A good overview of the Titi phenomenon is E. Solly, ‘Prince Titi’, N&Q, 6th s., 10 (26 July 1884), pp. 70–72. The information on de Saint Hyacinthe is from J. B. Shipley, ‘James Ralph, Prince Titi, and the Black Box of Frederick, Prince of Wales’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 71 (March 1967), pp. 143–57, on p. 145; for the rejection of the Ralph attribution, see p. 147, n. 11. 35. T. de Saint-Hyacinthe, The Memoirs and History of Prince Titi. Done from the French, by a person of quality (London: Anne Dodd, 1736), p. 7. 36. Ibid., pp. 155, 160. 37. Backscheider, ‘The Shadow of an Author’, p. 91. 38. Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings, p. xli. For the tangled publication history of The Idea of a Patriot King, see pp. xli–xliv. 39. Ibid., pp. xliii, xliv. 40. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 53. Cf Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties in Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings, p. 162: ‘To make the prince uneasy, or insecure, as we are now constituted, the whole body of the people must be uneasy under his government. A popular King of Great Britain will be always not only easy and secure, but in effect absolute. He will be, what the British constitution alone can make any prince, the absolute monarch of a free people.’ 41. Ibid., p. 55. 42. Ibid., p. 77. 43. Ibid., p. 72. 44. Ibid, p. 63. 45. For Patriotism and indolence, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, pp. 180–2. Haywood’s response to The Castle of Indolence is discussed below, pp. 165–6. 46. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 76. 47. Ibid., p. 77. 48. Ibid., p. 74. For apprehensions about the imaginary and irrational foundations of the modern self, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, especially Chapters 13 and 14. 49. Ibid., pp. 75, 76. 50. Ibid., p. 78, n. 1. 51. Ibid., p. 78. The political/sexual implications of ‘consent’ are explored at length in T. Bowers, Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660– 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 52. Ibid., p. 63. 53. Ibid., pp. 95, 70. 54. Ibid., p. 63. 55. Ibid., p. 95. 56. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 475. 57. Ibid., p. 471. 58. Ibid., p. 474. 59. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 92. 60. For a discussion of curiosity in Love in Excess that also considers issues of narrative selfconsciousness, see S. Black, ‘Trading Sex for Secrets in Haywood’s Love in Excess’, ECF, 15: 2 (2003), pp. 207–26.

Notes to pages 85–90

221

61. For an overview of curiosity in the period, see B. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 62. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 57. 63. Ibid., pp. 57, 56. 64. Ibid., p. 57. 65. E. Haywood, Epistles for the Ladies, in Works, set II, vol. 2, pp. 278, 279. Astrea, on p. 276, identifies Eovaai as a ‘little Book, which though it carries the Air of Romance, and is wrote in that Style, contains a very useful Allegory’ on the dangers of inquiring too closely into religious doctrines; she worries about ‘the turning of our Heads, with those Parts which appear too abstruse for our own Judgment to unfold’. 66. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 131. 67. Ibid. The misogynist Commentator is made to look foolish when he complacently observes, on p. 125, that ‘in the Character of Atamadoul, that of her whole Sex is decypher’d’; a subsequent footnote, on p. 131, does little however to disturb the misogyny: ‘tho’ we have no Magicians in our days, we see a great many Atamadoul Monkeys’. 68. Ibid., p. 132. 69. Ibid., p. 136. 70. Ibid., p. 131. 71. M. N. Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical: Women’s Speech, Haywood’s Parrot, and Its Antecedents’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 27: 1 (2008), pp, 63–91, p. 69. 72. L. Brown, Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 106. For a suggestive analysis of ‘ape-human miscegenation’ in relation to the ‘violent intimacy’ of European confrontation with the hominoid ape in the period, see chapter 2, pp. 27–63, and pp. 104–7. See also L. Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), chapter 6, pp. 221–65. 73. Eovaai, p. 131. 74. Ibid., pp. 92–3. 75. Ibid., p. 135. 76. Ibid., p. 149. 77. Ibid., p. 151. 78. Ibid., p. 137. 79. Ibid., p. 107. 80. Ibid., p. 151. 81. Ibid., p. 151, n. 1. 82. Beasley, ‘Portraits of a Monster’, p. 425. 83. Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing, p. 173. 84. For a reading of the forest scene that stresses its ‘anarchic and perverse comic energies’, see Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition’, p. 164. 85. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 152. 86. Ibid., p. 59. 87. Bolingbroke, in Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings, p. 233; for discussion of this passage, see Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 208. 88. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 110. 89. Ibid., pp. 113, 111. 90. Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, Letter XVII, in Armitage (ed.), Bolingbroke: Political Writings. p. 162. Cf Pope, Dunciad, Book IV, ll. 521–4: ‘A Feather shooting

222

Notes to pages 90–6

from another’s head, / Extracts his brain, and Principle is fled, / Lost is his God, his Country, ev’ry thing; / And nothing left but Homage to a King!’ 91. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 63. 92. Bowers, Force or Fraud, p. xiv. 93. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 477. 94. D. Nokes (ed.), Introduction, Jonathan Wild (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 24. 95. Kubek, ‘The Key to Stowe’, pp, 241–3, makes a case for William of Orange as the original of Glaza. The other monarch celebrated, Amezulto, is probably not James II, as others have suggested, but rather the conquering war hero Edward III, father of the Black Prince. Kubek, pp. 243–4, points out that Edward III was a dangerous figure: ‘the publisher of The Craftsman, in whose pages the Remarks first appeared, was arrested for the publication of the two Letters on Edward III’; quote on p. 244. 96. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 98. 97. Ibid., p. 80. 98. Ibid., p. 162. 99. Ibid., p. 162 100. R. Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism, and the Rise of the British Novel (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 135, argues otherwise: Haywood’s ‘image of Jacobitism’ is one of ‘quiet conviction and patience’. For ‘cosmic’ Jacobitism she refers the reader to D. Szechi, The Jacobites, Britain, and Europe, 1688–1788 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). 101. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 164. 102. C. L. Nixon, ‘“Stop a Moment at this Preface”: The Gendered Paratexts of Fielding, Barker, and Haywood’, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory, 32:2 (2002): pp. 123–153, on p. 144. 103. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 52. 104. Ibid., p. 114. 105. C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 36. 106. Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 37. 107. Haywood, Eovaai, p. 165. 108. Pateman, The Disorder of Women, p. 45.

5 At The Sign of Fame: 1741–1744 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

Some of these findings were presented at A Symposium on the Life and Works of Eliza Haywood: New Directions organized by Ros Ballaster on behalf of the Restoration to Reform Seminar of Oxford English Faculty, on 3 November 2008, and at a session organized by Betty Schellenberg at the 2009 ASECS meeting in Richmond, Virginia. See R. Harris, A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 28–9. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 17. No copies of the original issue of Sublime Character have survived. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 677, describes it as ‘a feeble 32-stanza attack’ on Walpole and reports it had been reprinted by April 1742 ‘in a collection under the title No Screen! Or, the Masque Remov’d with two other sixpenny pamphlets first published by J. Huggonson’. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 684.

Notes to pages 97–100 6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

223

Cogan was a publisher of Love-Letters on all Occasions (1730), and Spedding reports he was copyright holder of Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (Feb. 1743) and owned a portion of The Sopha, for in 1746 he sold a quarter of the copyright to Nourse: see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 376. For ‘squinting’ ‘Count Cog[a]n’, see Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, pp. 259–60. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, pp. 165, 329. D. Foxon, revised and edited by J. McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 2. For the standard account of these ‘trade publishers’, see M. Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1650–1750’, The Library, 6th series, 4 (1982), pp. 99–134. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 356. The tortured note on pp. 676–67 that attempts to explain away his failure to locate a single imprinted copy or advertisement for The Busy-Body smacks of desperation: ‘notwithstanding the fact that no copies of The Busy-Body are known with a Haywood imprint, and the fact that no advertisements have been traced for the book with a Haywood imprint outside of Haywood’s own works, it is possible that copies were issued with a Haywood imprint’. A similar concession with regard to Anti-Pamela is found on p. 357. Ibid., p. 686; see also p. 366. Ibid., p. 366. Cogan was advertising The Busy-Body and Anti-Pamela together in The Champion as early as 12 Nov. 1741. Humours of Whist appeared in May 1743 under the imprint of trade publisher J. Roberts and was subsequently issued as part of Charles Corbett’s Diverting Jumble. It was advertised on 13 Jan. 1744 in Daily Advertiser as ‘Printed for’ Haywood and described as based on certain well-known recent incidents, including the case of a noble lord’s son, two celebrated whist players near Hanover Square, and the son of a certain alderman. An advertisement in Daily Advertiser dated 11 January 1743/44 names five titles for sale at Fame: The Humours of Whist, The Chinese Orphan, Voyage to Lethe, Europe’s Catechism, and Sir Robert Vindicated. An entry in Henry Woodfall’s ledger, 1734–1747, indicates that Hatchett had commissioned the printing of both ‘Chinese’ items, A Chinese Tale (quarto) on 11 January 1739/40 and The Chinese Orphan on 28 January 1740/41. See P. T. P., ‘Woodfall’s Ledger, 1734–1747’, N&Q, 11 ( June 2, 1855), pp. 418–20, on p. 420. Frontispiece can be seen in P. Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London: Secker and Warburg, 1988), p. 181 where Chinese Tale is said to parody the oriental tale and have a cruel rape ending that sharply contrasts the ‘usually romantic oriental tale, and introduces into the satire an element of shocking realism’; he is unaware of the connection with either Hatchett or Haywood. A footnote to the title says: ‘See the Chinese orphan a tragedy for the Reason of this Term’. I am grateful to Sheila O’Connell, Asst Keeper British Prints before 1880, for her assessment, in Nov. 2008. For a description of the broadside, see F. G. Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Division I. Political and Personal Satires (London: British Museum, 1877), item 2555, pp. 439–40. This discovery is announced in K. R. King, ‘Eliza Haywood at the Sign of Fame in Covent Garden, 1742–1744’, N&Q 57 (2010), pp. 83–6. For contrasting speculative accounts, see Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, pp. 110–11, and Spedding, ‘Eliza Haywood, Writing (and) Pornography in 1742’, esp. pp. 242–3.

224

Notes to pages 101–6

20. F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London, vol. 36, The Parish of St. Paul Covent Garden (London: Athlone Press for Greater London Council, 1970), p. 91 and n. 112 on p. 333. The St Paul’s rate books for 1742–44 confirm the rates were paid by a Samuel Beavor or Bever Esq. for unnamed tenants. In 1745 Bever/Beavor disappears from the books. 21. P. R. Backscheider notes that ‘in a time when connections and friendships were crucial for access to publication and production, Haywood could not have been the solitary, bedraggled hack peddling her works bookseller to bookseller that she is so frequently described to be.’: see Backscheider, P. R. (ed.), Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xvi. 22. Staves, A Literary History of Women’s Writing, p. 167; J. J. Richetti (ed.), The History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), p. xiv; Ballaster, ‘A Gender of Opposition’, p.146. 23. N. Clarke, Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 202. 24. Hatchett, Remarkable Cause, p. 43. For Hatchett’s lodgings, see above, pp. 61–3. 25. She made this suggestion in an email conversation, October 2008. 26. D. Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital (London: Random House, 2009), pp. 173–6. 27. See S. E. Whyman, Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 67–9; and B. D. Henning (ed.), The House of Commons 1660–1690 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983), pp. 379–80. Later still it would come into a woman’s hands again and be the site for the sale of condoms. An advertisement taken out by a Mrs. A. M. Windsor announces that ‘for the convenience of her customers [she] has opened a shop under the piazza, corner of Russel Street, Covent Garden’ where she sold ‘machines, commonly called implements of safety’: see Cruickshank, The Secret History of Georgian London, pp. 211–12. 28. J. Mottley, The History and Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, 2 vols (London: M. Cooper, 1753), vol. 2, p. 652. 29. H. Phillips, Mid-Georgian London: A Topographical and Social Survey of Central and Western London about 1750 (London: Collins, 1964), p. 142ff. For Betty Careless in Haywood’s texts and reputation, see D. Oakleaf, ‘Circulating the Name of a Whore: Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, Betty Careless and the Duplicities of the Double Standard’, Women’s Writing, 15: 1 (2008), pp. 107–34. 30. Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, pp. 108, 110; C. Ingrassia, ‘Eliza Haywood, Periodicals, and the Function of Orality’, in L. M. Wright and D. J. Newman (eds), Fair Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2006), pp. 141–56, on p. 142. 31. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 374. 32. Ibid., pp. 374–5; see also p. 535: her ‘business would have brought her in daily contact with demi-reps, prostitutes and pimps’. 33. Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, p. 110. 34. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth, p. 2. 35. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 9, quoting from J. Black, Culloden and the ’45, p. 91 . 36. Pamela Censured (1741); quoted in C. Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), p. 2.

Notes to pages 106–11

225

37. G. Colman, Polly Honeycombe, A Dramatic Novel of One Act (London: Becket and Davies, 1760), p. 44. 38. A. Behn, preface to The Lucky Chance (1686); The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. J. Todd, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992–6), vol. 7, p. 217. Prologue, H. Fielding, The Modern Husband. A comedy (London: J. Watts, 1732). 39. Letter 5 October 1738, in A. Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. G. Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 4, pp. 138–9. 40. Haywood, Memoirs, vol. 1, p. 109. This is Manley’s usage in Atalantis. 41. Atherton, Political Prints in the Age of Hogarth, p. 27ff. 42. Ibid., To the Glory is reproduced as Plate 10 in Political Prints. In The Noble Stand: Or the Glorious CCIIII (Plate 12), a print celebrating Walpole’s defeat in the struggle over the Excise Bill, a double-trumpeted Fame proclaims ‘far and wide the Joyfull news’. The trumpeted woman who publishes joyful political news is a familiar device in literary satire as well and appears frequently in Haywood’s political writings. 43. See below, p. 125. 44. For the ‘period eye’ see M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). 45. J. Barchas, ‘Apollo, Sappho, and – a Grasshopper?! A Note on the Frontispieces to The Female Spectator’, in Newman and Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher, pp. 60–71, on p. 62. She finds, p. 60, ‘no evidence to suggest’ Haywood’s involvement in ‘the design or commission of these frontispieces’ but being unaware of the significance of the Fame figure she had little reason to press the possibility of Haywood’s involvement. 46. See below, p. 241, n. 72. 47. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 750. The last record of activity at Fame is found Feb. 1744 in the imprint to The Equity of Parnassus published by Charles Corbett.

6 The Female Spectator 1.

2.

3.

4.

Twenty-four parts of roughly 64 pages each were issued between April 1744 and May 1746. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 431, reports that The Female Spectator was ‘very successful, going through two editions in individual books and a further nine four-volume editions and issues in the following thirty years’. It was translated into German, French and Italian and later reprinted across the Atlantic. For an overview of the periodical as literary genre during this period, see I. Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–7. E. Haywood, The Female Spectator, in 2 vols, in set II, vols. 2 and 3 of Works, p. 257; hereafter, FS followed by vol. number within set. According to Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism, p. 6, as ‘women were increasingly portrayed as indifferent to party politics, an address to women was taken to signal a high-minded political disinterestedness and preference for literary subjects.’ FS 2, p. 17. For Haywood’s appropriation of cultural authority, see Italia, The Rise Of Literary Journalism, pp. 123–39; R. W. Jones, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Discourse of Taste’, in E. J. Clery, C. Franklin, and P. Garside (eds), Authorship, Commerce and the Public: Scenes of Writing, 1750–1850 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 103–19. For a discussion of the development of the periodical in relation to polite culture in an earlier period, see L. E. Klein, ‘Shifting Possibilities of Urbanness, 1660–1715’, in T. Hitchcock

226

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

Notes to pages 111–15 and H. Shore (eds), The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), pp. 27–39. FS 3, p. 283. See P. M. Spack’s introduction to E. Haywood, Selections from The Female Spectator (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. xvii. R. D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740–1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 92. Book 8 has received a fair amount of attention. For a valuable reading that focuses on feminist elements see E. T. Bannet, ‘Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World’, in Newman and Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher, pp. 82–103. Also useful is R. Carnell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green: Gender and Friendship in Eliza Haywood’s Political Periodicals, 32:2 (1998–9), pp. 199–214. E. A. Wilputte notes the uptick in political reference in Book 8, which she interprets as part of a sophisticated exposure of governmental attempts at censorship: see ‘“Too ticklish to meddle with”: The Silencing of The Female Spectator’s Political Correspondents’ in Newman and Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher, pp. 122–140. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 181. For a scrupulously detailed account of politics and the press in the immediate post-Walpole period, see Harris, A Patriot Press. M. F. Suarez, ‘Secular Lessons: Biblical Satire, Parody, Imitation, and Emulation in Eighteenth-Century Chronicles of British Politics’, The Age of Johnson, 19 (2009), pp. 69–128, on p. 81. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, p. 237. M. Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 112. Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, p. 99. This chapter revises portions of K. R. King, ‘Patriot or Opportunist? Eliza Haywood and the Politics of The Female Spectator’, in Newman and Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher, pp. 104–21. Italia, Rise of Literary Journalism, pp. 16–17. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v., ‘Heywood’. Love in Excess had been reprinted as recently as 1742 as part of the fourth edition of the four-volume Secret Histories, Novels and Poems and published in installments from 4 Sept 1741 to 6 January 1742 in William Rayner’s London Morning Advertiser. WEP, 26 February 1756. The same notice appeared in the days following in LEP, Gazetteer and Public Advertiser. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 432. A. C. Elias, Jr., Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington, 2 vols (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997), vol. 1, p. 227. This passage appeared in the second volume of Memoirs, published Dec. 1748. See FS 2, p. 20 and p. 446, n. 5. The poem, entitled ‘Verses Wrote in the Blank Leaf of Mrs. Haywood’s Novel’, includes: ‘’Tis Love, Eliza’s soft Affection fires, / Eliza writes, but Love alone inspires’. This copy, with minor changes, is to be found in the advertisements for Books 2 through 5. A contributor thus acknowledged is ‘Leonidas’, that is, Richard Glover, poet, merchant, oppositional City spokesman and author of the hugely popular blank-verse Patriot epic of that name published in 1737. He contributed an epistle signed Leonidas.

Notes to pages 115–18

227

23. The address to the ‘authors’, clearly based upon inside information, congratulates Haywood, unnamed, on her ‘Recovery’ from a serious illness. See below, pp. 162–3 for further discussion. 24. Corbett replaced Thomas Cooper as publisher of The Champion. Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 204–5 reports that WEP, a tri-weekly, was established in March 1746 as part of a ‘small wave of new papers and periodicals that emerged alongside the National Journal in 1746’. 25. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 750. 26. M. Harris, ‘Literature and Commerce in Eighteenth-century London: the Making of The Champion’, in J. A. Downie and T. N. Corns (eds), Telling People What to Think: Early Eighteenth-Century Periodicals from The Review to The Rambler (London: Frank Cass, 1993), pp. 94–115, on p. 102. 27. H. R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1726 to 1775 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1932 [for 1930]), s.v., Charles Corbett. The elder Corbett is said to have ‘[d]ealt in plays, political tracts, children’s books, and shared in many large undertakings’; he published the British Magazine starting March 1746 and was ‘spoken of as “a man well respected by his acquaintance”’. 28. See Harris, ‘Literature and Commerce’, p. 104. 29. Battestin with Battestin, Henry Fielding: A Life, p. 259. 30. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 403. 31. Harris, ‘Literature and Commerce’, p. 99. William Owen, printer and publisher of The Remembrancer, a paper that figures importantly in the story of Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), was also situated in the Temple Bar area. 32. See N. MacKenzie, review of P. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, in The Age of Johnson, 17 (2006), pp. 437–43, on p. 442. 33. Ibid., p. 439. 34. N. K. Miller, Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 8, 106. 35. For a passage often read as ‘autobiographical’, see FS 2, pp. 17–18. 36. H. Fielding, Contributions to The Champion and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley, Series: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), p. xlvi. The Champion was launched 15 November 1739. No evidence ties Haywood directly to this famous oppositional periodical, but she is known to have had close professional contact with no fewer than six members of the staff : Fielding, his co-editor James Ralph, her future chief publisher Thomas Gardner, and three booksellers with whom she had significant dealings: Francis Cogan, John Nourse, and Charles Corbett. For an overview of the production side of the paper, see Harris, ‘Literature and Commerce’. 37. Harris, ‘Literature and Commerce’, pp. 94, 95. 38. Advertisements for Books 2 and 3 in General Advertiser, Daily Advertiser, Old England, Westminster Journal. The quote above is from Daily Advertiser, 19 July 1744, which begins: ‘The two First Books (which were lately publish’d, and are now selling) having met with the general Approbation of all who have read them … ’. 39. H. St. John Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, 2nd edn (London: Francklin, 1747), p. 6: the ‘ancient venerable Gentleman’, that is, Bolingbroke’s surrogate in his Remarks on the History of England, declares it ‘a Spirit, which springs from Information and Conviction, that has diffused itself not only to all Orders of Men … but to Men of

228

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Notes to pages 118–23 all Denominations’ and ‘must always be national, since it has no Direction but to the national Interest’. FS 2, p. 291. Ibid., 3, p. 412. Ibid., 2, pp. 72, 70. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 95. GM, no. 14, Dec 1744, p. 669. OEJ, 12 January 1745. Daily Post, 4 January 1745, advertised it as ‘stitch’d up’ with Book 9. FS 2, p. 292. Ibid., pp. 293, 294. See P. Colson, White’s, 1693–1950 (London: William Heinemann, 1951), esp. chapter 5. FS 2, p. 19, p. 293. Ibid., 3, p. 411. Ibid., 3, p. 295. Carnell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’, p. 203. The reference to the ‘daily Romances’ comes in a letter from L. D. in Book 23; see FS 3, p. 355. For a discussion of Haywood’s wary fascination with the seductive mix of fact and fiction, see Wilputte, ‘Too Ticklish’, pp. 132–4. FS 2, p. 293. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 294. Ibid., p. 330. For further detail on the male correspondents see King, ‘Patriot or Opportunist’, p. 111. D. F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), No. 4, vol. 1, p. 21. FS 2, p. 302. E. T. Bannet, ‘Haywood’s Spectator and the Female World’, in Newman and Wright (eds), Fair Philosopher, pp. 82–103, on p. 98. See Italia, The Rise of Literary Journalism, p. 11. Jones, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Discourse of Taste’, p. 109, argues that the exercise of taste (something akin to moral discrimination in his analysis) gave women the authority to make themselves present in a variety of spheres, licensing them ‘to talk about a wide variety of topics, many of which might otherwise be thought to lie beyond the province of women’s experience as it had previously been defined’. FS 2, p. 296. Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, p. 3. H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 190. FS 2, p. 298. Ibid., p. 297. Anon., The Livery Man: or, Plain Thoughts on Publick Affairs (London, 1740), p. 7. Dickinson, who also discusses The Livery Man, attributes it to John Campbell; see p. 324, n. 31. For further examples, all later than The Female Spectator, he refers the reader to L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714–60 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 170. See also Anon., The Desertion Discussed; or, the last and present opposition placed in their true light (London, 1743), p. 2: ‘every Man who con-

Notes to pages 123–9

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

229

tributes in any degree to the public Stock, has a Right to inquire into the Measures and Circumstances of the Public, because they are in some measure his own. Among Slaves it may be Treason to inquire; but it is just, equitable and legal, while we are free’. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 32. Anon., The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated. By a Gentleman of the Inner-Temple (London, 1742), p. 51. Anon., The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated, p. 52. Cf. the Female Spectator on the ‘Raw-Head and Bloody Bones Expedition’: FS 2, p. 316. Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 32–3, 33. Dickinson, The Politics of the People, p. 192. This dialogue was of sufficient interest to be reprinted in The Ladies Magazine, 16 June 1750, by ‘Jasper Goodwill’ with an introduction adapted from The Female Spectator but no acknowledgement of its source. Carnell, ‘It’s not Easy Being Green’, p. 204. Jones, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Discourse of Taste’, p. 114, calls attention to the Female Spectator’s ‘uninhibited’ confidence, her disdain for ‘any notion that this is not a topic fit for a women’s [sic] ear or upon which a woman should not presume to speak’. FS 2, pp. 307, 308. Ibid., pp. 312, 313. Ibid., 2, p. 318. Ibid., p. 318. Bolingbroke, Remarks on the History of England, p. 321. Colley, In Defiance, p. 245. FS 2, p. 319. See King, ‘Patriot or Opportunist?’, pp. 118–19. Quoted in Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, p. 248. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v. ‘James Ralph’. L. Okie, Augustan Historical Writing: Histories of England in the English Enlightenment (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), p. 157. See also his ODNB entry on Ralph. For Haywood’s opposition to the Jew Bill, see S. V. Muse, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Jew Bill’, N&Q, 57:1 (2010), pp. 105–08. For detailed background the standard source is T. W. Perry, Public Opinion, Propaganda, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study of the Jew Bill of 1753 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962). Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century, p. 148. He cites L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, 2nd edn (1957), p. 229. See Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, p. 131. A Vindication of our Present Royal Family (1744): see Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 132, 133. Quoted in Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 133. Quoted in Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole, p. 131. The pre-publication advertisement placed in OEJ, 21 April 1744, was identical to notices published in a number of other papers. Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 39–40. Okie, Augustan Historical Writing, p. 157 reports: ‘When Dodington joined the Broadbottom administration in 1744, Ralph was pensioned by the Treasury at 200 pounds per year.’ The Duchess of Bedford’s husband, a Whig, became Lord of the Admiralty and her father, Lord Gower, a Tory leader turned Whig, became Lord Privy Seal in the new government.

230

Notes to pages 129–35

96. E. A. Wilputte, ‘Parody in Eliza Haywood’s A Letter from H---- G---g, Esq’, ECF, 17:2 (2005), pp. 207–30, on p. 208. 97. FS 3, p. 207. 98. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 193. 99. Ibid., p. 196. 100. Ibid., pp. 194, 193. See also B. Harris, ‘England’s Provincial Newspapers and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–1746’, History, 80 (1995), pp. 5–21. 101. FS 3, p. 178. 102. Ibid., pp. 178, 200. 103. Ibid., p. 178. 104. Ibid., p. 201. 105. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 194. GM, vol. 15 (1745), is prefaced by a poem from Britannicus To Mr Urban ‘On his Compleating the 15th Volume of his Magazine’ which honours him for setting aside ‘lighter themes’ so as to fill the page with ‘heav’n-born ardour, and an honest rage; / In Britain’s cause exerting all your art, / Rouse English virtue in each English heart’. 106. For Mary Stuart, see Rose, Political Satire, p. 122. Carnell, Partisan Politics, p. 131, sees EH’s previously submerged support for the Stuarts coming out in the open in the 1740s. 107. FS 3, p. 178. 108. FS 2, p. 70. 109. Ibid., p. 316. 110. For loyalism see Harris, ‘England’s Provincial Newspapers’, p. 12. For anti-Jacobite commentary at the ‘height of the rebellion’, see Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 193.

7 The Parrot 1.

This overview of the mood of the nation following the Jacobite rebellion draws upon K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715– 1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially pp. 165–78. 2. J. Black, ‘A Short-Lived Jacobite Newspaper: The National Journal of 1746’ in K. Schweizer and J. Black (eds), Politics and the Press in Hanoverian Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), pp. 77–88, on p. 78. Unaware of Parrot, Black on p. 77 describes The National Journal as ‘the sole Jacobite paper active in England during the period of the ‘45’. 3. C. Blouch, headnote to E. Haywood, The Parrot, in set II, vol. 1 of Works, p. 175. 4. FS 3, p. 423. 5. The first ad I have been able to locate was in LEP for 31 July; it was followed by an ad in General Advertiser. 6. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 491. 7. FS 3, pp. 422, 423. 8. Ibid., p. 391. 9. See Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 640. 10. H. Fielding, no. 1, 5 Nov. 1745, in The True Patriot and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley, Series: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 106. 11. See Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 45–6; Harris, ‘The London Evening Post’, pp. 1136–7; Black, ‘A Short-Lived Jacobite Newspaper’. Harris, London Newspapers, p. 131, reports

Notes to pages 135–9

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

231

that ‘there is no clear indication that the National Journal, set up by Gordon in 1746 and rapidly suppressed, had any Jacobite support.’ For WEP and its associations with EH, see above, pp. 115–16. The story of Dawson’s fiancée discussed later in this chapter was reprinted in full in the WEP for 7 Aug 1746 with a note that ‘upon enquiry, every circumstance was literally true’. This is the first indication I have found of the special relationship between Haywood/Gardner and WEP. Haywood, The Parrot, in set II, vol. 1 of Works, p. 312; hereafter Parrot. Her full title, The Parrot. With a Compendium of the Times, seems almost to parrot Fielding’s The True Patriot. And, The History of Our Own Times. Their political differences are starkly visible in their opposed attitudes toward Cumberland, described in True Patriot, 7 (17 December 1745) as ‘a young, brave, vigilant, and indefatigable Prince’. In February 1747 Fielding published Ovid’s Art of Love Paraphrased referring prefatorily to a ‘Passage so justly applicable to the Glorious Duke of Cumberland, which cannot fail of pleasing every good Briton’: see H. Fielding, The Jacobite’s Journal and Related Writings, ed. W. B. Coley, Series: The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. xxi. Quoted in Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical’, on p. 77. Downie, A Political Biography of Henry Fielding, p. 155, from a chapter entitled ‘a strenuous advocate for the ministry’. See also Fielding, The True Patriot, ed. Coley, pp. lx–cvi; quote from The True Patriot on p. 309. For developments in the press, 1745–46, see Harris, A Patriot Press, pp. 204–5. MacKenzie, review of P. Spedding, p. 442. Extracted in GM, vol. 16 (1746), p. 366. Westminster Journal, established late 1741, was described in Feb 1744, along with Old England, as having outdone ‘all that went before them in virulence, scandal, and violence’; quoted in Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 132. Harris, ‘The London Evening Post’, pp. 1132–56, on p. 1140, writes of LEP in the 1750s that its Tory themes include ‘the issues raised by poverty, luxury, social disorders, conditions in the grain market, irreligion, and problems relating to the law. The paper became, in this way, more a vehicle for the discussion of social and economic problems than had been the case in the previous decade.’ Parrot, p. 181. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., pp. 184, 186. Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 198. Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical’, p. 81. See also Carnell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’, p. 206. Parrot, p. 195. Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., pp. 184–5. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 226. ‘An Old Englishman’ made a similar point in OEJ, 20 Sept. 1746, while Parrot was still running: ‘I often keep company with foreigners, and am sorry to find that our late pamphlets, journals, and news-papers have given them a very mean, and, I hope, unjust opinion of the understanding, as well as morals, of the people of this nation’; quoted in GM, vol. 16 (1746), p. 485. The letter is a contribution to the mercy debate. Ibid., p. 198.

232

Notes to pages 139–43

32. Ibid., pp. 308, 307–8. 33. Ibid., p. 232. Cf. Fielding: ‘Foreigners have found fault with the Cruelty of the English Drama, in representing frequent Murders upon the Stage. In fact, this is not only cruel, but highly injudicious’; see H. Fielding, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (London: Millar, 1751), p. 123. 34. Ibid., p. 198. 35. Ibid., pp. 304–5. 36. Ibid., p. 312. Similar use of the parrot idea was made in Anon., The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated, pp. 34–5: the ‘common People’ are ‘but Parrots’ of the court writers and ‘to talk of forcing the People to alter their Tone would be likewise a little hard, since they are but Parrots of their [the government writers’] own teaching’. 37. Fielding, The True Patriot, ed. Coley, p. 307. 38. General Advertiser continued its effort to defuse allegations of cruelty into the autumn, on 7 October defending the duke for ‘necessary Severities’ practised in the Highlands. 39. W. A. Speck, The Butcher: The Duke of Cumberland and the Suppression of the 45 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 170. 40. Wilson, The Sense of the People, p. 175. 41. Parrot, pp. 200, 237. 42. Ibid., p. 200. 43. Ibid., p. 201. 44. Ibid., p. 200. 45. Ibid., pp. 200–1. 46. Fielding, The True Patriot, ed. Coley, p. 227. 47. Parrot, p. 200. 48. Ibid., pp. 304–9. 49. Ibid., p. 308. Amicus Veritas’s argument echoes both FS and a 1742 pamphlet that makes use of the parrot trope, Anon., The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated. Possibly Amicus Veritas is a name taken by (or bestowed upon) a single contributor to all three texts, not impossibly Haywood herself. The argument in each premises that all taxpayers are entitled to scrutinize the conduct of the government they finance. Thus Amicus Veritas, p. 308: ‘The meanest and most abject Man contributes his Mite to whatever is told him is for the general Utility, and has an equal Right, in a Land of Liberty, to know in what Manner it is disposed on’. Cf. FS 2, p. 298: the ‘meanest Person has also an equal Right with the greatest, to expect a satisfactory Account in every thing relating to the Common-Wealth:--He has his all at Stake as well as the most Opulent’; and Anon., The Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated, p. 51: the ‘lowest Fellow in the Kingdom contributes out of what he gets to the public service, so it seems but just that he should, if he has a Mind, know what he pays for, and see, if he can see, whether Public is well served or not’. These parallels and echoes are suggestive. Further research may establish with greater clarity and detail Haywood’s involvement in oppositional pamphleteering. 50. Parrot, p. 225. Fielding, True Patriot No. 33, finds evidence for the ‘Lenity of this Paper’ in its having declined to reflect harshly ‘those Wretches’ ( Jacobite rebels) in custody: see Fielding, The True Patriot, ed. Coley, p. 308. 51. Extracted in GM, vol. 16 (1746), p. 414. 52. Ibid., p. 415. 53. Parrot, p. 227. 54. H. Walpole to Horace Mann, 12 August 1746 OS, Corr. 19, p. 296. 55. Parrot, p. 228.

Notes to pages 143–7

233

56. Ibid., p. 226. Cf. Dryden, in a passage she quotes in Book 18 (19 Oct 1745) of FS 3, p. 200: ‘The Rabble gather round the Man of News, / And, gaping, seem to listen with their Mouths’. 57. Ibid., p. 226. 58. Ibid., p. 231. 59. Ibid., p. 229. 60. Ibid., p. 225. 61. Jones, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Discourse of Taste’, pp. 116, 117. 62. Fielding, Jacobite’s Journal, ed. Coley, p. 200. 63. Parrot, pp. 226, 229. 64. Ibid., p. 189. Cf. Fielding, True Patriot No. 1, 5 Nov 1745, in The True Patriot, ed. Coley: ‘The first little Imperfection in these Writings, is, that there is scarce a Syllable of truth in any of them’. 65. Ibid., pp. 238, 318. See also p. 254: ‘They certainly make a Will o’ the Wisp of him, for there is nothing related concerning him to be depended upon, and it is Time alone can unfold the Mistery’. 66. Ibid., p. 206. 67. Ibid., p. 222. 68. Ibid., p. 192. 69. Ibid., p. 239. 70. Ibid., p. 192. 71. Ibid., p. 192. 72. GM, vol. 16 (1746), p. 398. 73. R. Griffiths, Authentic Copies of the Letters and Other Papers Delivered, at their Execution, by the nine rebels (London, 1746), p. 19. General Advertiser, 8 August 1746, reported that ‘the Printer of the Letters and Papers deliver’d by the Rebels at their Execution’ was taken into custody the previous Wednesday by two of the King’s messengers. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 205, notes that an account is available in SP 36/86, fo. 350. 74. Anon., A Genuine Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Dying Words of … James Dawson … (London: J. Nicolson, 1746), pp. 39, 40. Similar scenes occur in GM 16 (1746), p. 398 and Westminster Journal for 2 August. 75. Parrot, p. 193. 76. H. Fielding, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. A new edition (London: Millar, 1754), p. 201. 77. Parrot, p. 193. 78. Memoirs 1, pp. 280, 282. The Earl of Derwentwater was one of two peers executed after the rising of 1715. In fact, although his wife campaigned strenuously for a reprieve, she was nowhere near Tower Hill when he was executed. She lived to quarrel with her mother-in-law and eventually move to Brussels, where she died in 1723. See M. Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion: Preventing and Punishing Insurrection in Early Hanoverian Britain (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 34–5. 79. Madam d’Ensilden’s ‘constancy’ to Patkul ‘remained unshaken as a rock’; when he is condemned to be executed, she ‘only waits till she hears the sentence of his fate given, to dye, if possible, at the same moment of his execution’: Haywood, The Fortunate Foundlings, p. 233ff. 80. N. MacKenzie, ‘Eliza Haywood in a “Scrutinising Age”’, The Age of Johnson, 16 (2005), pp. 177–97, on p. 182.

234

Notes to pages 148–52

81. Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical’, p. 65; Carnell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’, pp. 205– 9. See also R. Carnell, ‘The Very Scandal of Her Tea Table: Eliza Haywood’s Response to the Whig Public Sphere’, in C. Mounsey (ed.), Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), pp. 255–73, especially pp. 263–6. 82. F. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 137. 83. See Carnell, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’, p. 207. 84. Parrot, p. 197. 85. F. McLynn, The Jacobites (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 127. 86. Cf. Pelham to Cumberland, 8 Sept 1747: a ‘lurking Jacobite spirit begins to shew itself ’: Coxe, Memoirs of the Pelham Administration, vol. 1, p. 375. 87. Parrot, p. 212. 88. Ibid., p. 288. 89. Ibid., p. 228. 90. First recorded in ECCO in Works in Verse and Prose, of William Shenstone (London: Dodsley, 1764), p. 185; The Tyburn Chronicle: or, villainy displayed in all its branches, 4 vols (London: Cooke, 1768), vol. 4, p. 309. 91. ‘The Origin of Shenstone’s Ballad of Jemmy Dawson’, European Magazine, January 1801, pp. 37–8, on p. 37. 92. The Glasgow Miscellany; or, Amusing Companion, 2 vols (Glasgow: Duncan, 1800), vol. 2, pp. 153–155. 93. J. Browne, A History of the Highlands, and of the Highlands Clans, 4 vols (London: Fullarton, 1845), vol. 3, p. 339. 94. E. Cruickshanks, Political Untouchables: The Tories and the ’45 (London: Duckworth, 1979), p. 106. 95. For the transient nature of political journalism, see J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 114–5. For seditious libel, see L. Hanson, Government and the Press 1695–1763 (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press and Humphrey Milford, 1936), p. 17. 96. Black, ‘A Short-Lived Jacobite Newspaper’, p. 77. 97. Harris, ‘London Evening Post’, p. 1141. 98. This account relies heavily on Ch. 8, ‘Political Control of the Press’ in M. Harris, London Newspapers, pp. 134–54. 99. Harris, London Newspapers, p. 149. 100. Harris, London Newspapers, pp. 148–9. 101. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 186. 102. Ibid., p. 40; Black, ‘A Short-Lived Jacobite Newspaper’, p. 163. 103. Black, English Press in the Eighteenth Century, p. 158. 104. Using Burney online I am able to locate only three ads, two in LEP (2 Aug., 23 Aug.) and one in General Advertiser (6 Aug). 105. Parrot, pp. 309, 312. 106. Ibid., p. 312. 107. Ibid., p. 313. 108. For further discussion, see Harris, London Newspapers, pp. 149–50. 109. Old England, or, The Broadbottom Journal, 4 Oct. 1746.

Notes to pages 152–60

235

110. R. Myers and M. Harris (eds), Censorship & the Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1992), p. viii. 111. Parrot, p. 184. 112. Harris, London Newspapers, p. 153. 113. Powell, ‘Parroting and the Periodical’, p. 80.

8 Epistles for the Ladies 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Deposition, 14 December 1749, from Hannah Stredder describes her ‘mistress’ as living in ‘Lodgings’; see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 754. Haywood’s deposition, dated 14 Jan 1750, identifies her as ‘Elizabeth Haywood of Durham Yard in the Strand Widow’; see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 755. Her name appears in none of the rate books for the area. C. Blouch, headnote, Epistles for the Ladies, in set I, vol. 2 of Works, p. 3. Over the next month ads also appeared in LEP, the General Evening Post, and the General Advertiser. Interestingly, Epistles seems to have been conceived as a whole (‘An Entire New Work’) to be issued in installments (‘in single Books, Monthly’) for a total of three volumes. In the event, the three volumes projected shrank to two. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 505, reports that Gardner registered the copyright on 14 Nov. The information regarding volumes (‘not to exceed Three’) is found in the 15 November ad in LEP. Haywood, Epistles for the Ladies, in set I, vol. 2 of Works, p. 318; hereafter, Epistles. H. Walpole to Richard West, 4 May 1742, in Corr. 13, p. 249, n. 8. LEP, 15 November 1748, in an announcement that Book I is published ‘This Day’. Immediately beneath is an advertisement for the second edition of The Castle of Indolence published ‘This Day’. Epistles, p. 177. Epistles, p. 48. Epistles, p. 132. J. Cleland, ‘Letter II. The Idea of a Patriot King’, MR 1 ( June 1749): pp. 147–58, on p. 147. For the attribution, see B. C. Nangle, The Monthly Review, first series, 1749–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. 10, 146 [item 2530]. J. Cleland, ‘Letters. ‘On the spirit of Patriotism. On the idea of a Patriot King. On the state of parties at the accession of King George the first’, Monthly Review 1 (May 1749), pp. 52–64, on p. 63. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 112. Ibid., p. 14. G. Ashe, The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality, revised edn (1974; Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000), p. 115. A. N. Newman, ‘Leicester House Politics, 1748–1751’, English Historical Review, 76: 301 (1961), pp. 577–89, on p. 577. For Dodington as politician and patron, see J. Carswell, The Old Cause: Three Biographical Studies in Whiggism (London: Cresset Press, 1954), pp. 131–265. Memoirs 2, p. 267. See above, pp. 38–9. J. Sambrook, James Thomson 1700–1748: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 56. Carswell, The Old Cause, pp. 211–13. J. Carswell and L. A. Dralle (eds), The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. xiii.

236 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes to pages 160–6 See above, pp. 126–9. Ibid., p. 215. Carswell, The Old Cause, p. 200. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 44. Baker, The Companion to the Play-House, s.v ‘James Ralph’. H. Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, 25 June 1749 OS, in Corr. vol. 20, p. 73. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 81. Fielding, Jacobite’s Journal, ed. Coley, pp. 212–3, 215. Coley suggests Fielding is responding to Remembrancer No. 13, 5 Mar. 1748; see also Nos. 11 & 12. Ibid., p. 424ff. Epistles, p. 287. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 502; he was unaware of the Remembrancer notices. An asterisked reference in Epistles Book 12, on p. 430, to a ‘long and dangerous Fit of Sickness’ refers by implication to Haywood. In a deposition dated 14 Jan 1750 EH claims to have been bedridden ‘above two months’ and without eyesight for ‘about Six months’: see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 756. Bottom right corner of first page. The second volume of Epistles is prominently advertised by Gardner in WEP, 12 June 1750, as ‘In a few Days will be published’. In Sept. and Oct. 1755 EH (or possibly Gardner) used a notice repeatedly placed in WEP to acknowledge the ‘great Reception’ FS and Epistles had received and to give thanks for the ‘many complimentary Letters they [the authors] have received, particularly from the Ladies, to whom they are induced to think they are principally indebted for the Largeness of their Sale’. See chapter 6, pp. 115–16. Plomer, A Dictionary of Printers and Booksellers, s.v., William Owen. Carswell and Dralle, The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, p. 27. GM, vol. 17 (1747), p. 621. H. Walpole, Memoirs of King George I, 3 vols, ed. J. Brooke (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), vol. 1, p. 231. ODNB, s.v., James Thomson. Sambrook, James Thomson, p. 170. H. Walpole to Richard West, 4 May 1742, Corr.13, p. 249. Sambrook, James Thomson, p. 271. Fielding is credited by A. D. McKillop with writing ‘the first full appreciation’ of The Castle of Indolence in The Jacobite’s Journal No. 27, 4 June 1748: see Fielding, Jacobite’s Journal, ed. Coley, p. 302. Fielding quotes are on p. 301. Epistles, p. 47. Ibid., p. 49. Sambrook, James Thomson, p. 270, noting on the same page ‘the politically-alert Henry Fielding’ fails to ‘hint at any political allegory’. For a reading of the political import of the poem, see C. Gerrard, ‘The Castle of Indolence and the Opposition to Walpole’, RES, n.s. 41 (1990), pp. 45–64. Epistles, p. 47. J. Thomson, The Castle of Indolence. An Allegorical Poem (London, 1748). Epistles, p. 115. Ibid.; see Book 4, p. 130, where Young is twice cited by Leonidas, and Book 6, p. 232, in Astrea’s letter to Publicola. Ibid., p. 459–60, n. 11.

Notes to pages 166–70

237

53. Ibid., pp. 116, 117. 54. Ibid., pp. 129–133; quote on p. 133. 55. See L. Namier and J. Brooke (eds), The House of Commons 1754–1790 (London: for the History of Parliament Trust, 1964), s.v., Richard Glover. His Memoirs are described thus: ‘though often inaccurate on political events and full of vastly inflated self-importance, [they] at least give an indication of his activities and opinions during these years.’ 56. Carswell, The Old Cause, p. 263. 57. R. Glover, Memoirs by a Celebrated Literary and Political Character (London: John Murray, 1814), p. 44. 58. Gerrard, Aaron Hill, p. 247. 59. Epistles, p. 468, n. 1. 60. Ibid., p. 394. ‘On the excellent Clarismonda’s intending a Voyage to Spain’ appeared in Miscellanies (1725) as ‘On Eliza’s Design’d Voyage to Spain’. 61. Ibid., p. 391. In connection with the ode in Letter CXL she is described as afflicted with an ‘Excess of Modesty’ and fearful of the judgment of her reader: see p. 430. 62. Ibid., pp. 430–33. Sir Watkin’s son and heir was born on 8 April 1749. Since Sir Watkin died on 26 Sept 1749, the poem was probably written in the interval between early April and late September. 63. F. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 396. 64. Epistles, p. 430. 65. Colley, In Defiance, pp. 259, 246. 66. R. Rolt, ‘A Poem sacred to the Memory of the late Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart’ (London: W. Owen, 1749), p. 12. 67. Epistles, p. 431. 68. Ibid., pp. 48, 231. 69. Astrea figures in men’s writings, of course. See, e.g., H. St. John Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon parties; in several letters to Caleb D’Anvers Esq (London: Francklin, 1754), p. 183: ‘if servility and servitude are to over-run the whole world, like injustice, and liberty is to retire from it, like Astraea; our portion of the abandon’d globe will have, at least, the mournful honour, whenever it happens, of shewing her last, her parting steps’. Cf Thomson, The Castle of Indolence, Canto I, XI: ‘For when hard-hearted Interest first began / To poison earth, Astraea left the plain; / Guile, violence, and murder seiz’d on man; / And, for soft milky streams, with blood the rivers ran’. 70. Epistles, p. 147. 71. Ibid., p. 278. There is a study to be done of Haywood’s apparent swerve toward High Anglican piety in her late work. To give just one example, Eusebia, on p. 438, urges Ardella to take on a new role as a poet in the ‘religious Strain’ and on the next page specifically encourages her to write about Mary Magdalene, that ‘pious Penitent’, at the sepulchre – an incident reflecting on ‘the Honour of our Sex’. 72. M. G. H. Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 71. Epistles quote is on p. 112, italics reversed. 73. Epistles, p. 112. Her praise of the ‘very worthy Gentleman’, on pp. 112–13, stops short of endorsement of a Stuart restoration: ‘it is the Hope of your Friends, who are all honest and disinterested, that you will yet have an Opportunity of exerting them [his talents], which is a Day sincerely wished, and ardently prayed for, not only for your own Sake, but for that of Numbers whom your Example might reform’. The significance of this letter was pointed out by MacKenzie, ‘Eliza Haywood in a “Scrutinising Age”’, p. 182.

238

Notes to pages 171–9

74. H. St. John Bolingbroke, Letters, on the Spirit of Patriotism: on the idea of a patriot King (London: Millar, 1749), p. 29. 75. Epistles, p. 47. 76. Epistles, p. 49. 77. The figure is from Newman, ‘Leicester House Politics’, p. 579; Harris, ‘The London Evening Post’, p. 1141. 78. Colley, In Defiance, p. 252. 79. N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 87. 80. Quoted in Newman, ‘Leicester House Politics’, p. 580. 81. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, p. 33. 82. Glover, Memoirs, p. 55. 83. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 27. 84. H. H. Marchmont, A Serious Exhortation to the Electors of Great Britain (London: T Cooper, 1740), pp. 58, 59. 85. Epistles, p. 48. 86. Ibid., pp. 231, 234. Publicola is unidentified. 87. Ibid., pp. 116, 117. 88. Ibid., p. 132. 89. Ibid., p. 286. Press coverage from Jan. 1749 confirms Blouch’s speculative identification; see Rogers, Whigs and Cities, p. 87. 90. Ibid., p. 287. 91. Ibid., p. 127. 92. Ibid., p. 287. 93. Ibid., pp. 395, 397. 94. Ibid., p. 399. 95. Ibid., p. 233. 96. For my understanding of the patriarchal underpinnings of Bolingbroke’s political thought I am indebted to I. Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (1968; Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). 97. Ibid., p. 96. 98. Epistles, pp. 146, 147.

9 Was Haywood a Jacobite? 1. 2.

Carnell, Partisan Politics, pp. 131, 140. Wilputte, ‘Parody in Eliza Haywood’s A Letter from H--- G---g Esq’, ECF, 17: 2 (2005), pp. 207–30, p. 207. 3. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 525. 4. MacKenzie, ‘Eliza Haywood in a “Scrutinising Age”’, p. 177. 5. Ibid., p. 191. 6. Epistles, p. 112, italics reversed.. The letter to the ‘very worthy Gentleman’ appeared in Book 3, published 31 December 1748, just a week after Charles was expelled from France, on 23 December. 7. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, p. 396. 8. Harris, ‘The London Evening Post’, p. 1150. 9. Ibid., p. 1141. 10. Ibid., p. 1151.

Notes to pages 179–83

239

11. Ibid., p. 1140. 12. See Colley, In Defiance, p. 257. 13. H. Erskine-Hill, ‘Twofold Vision in Eighteenth-Century Writing’, ELH , 64: 4 (1997), pp. 903-24, on p. 921. 14. Epistles, p. 425. F. Brooke, Ode IX, in Virginia, A Tragedy, with odes, pastorals, and translations (London: Printed for the author, Millar, 1756), pp. 154–5. A footnote explains that the reference to the ‘Patriot-Monarch’ in the Ode was meant ‘to express the Hopes almost universally conceiv’d, at the Time this Ode was wrote, of a most amiable Prince’. For Brooke and the Prince of Wales, see B. A. Schellenberg, The Professionalization of Women Writers in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 58–9. 15. Epistles, p. 326. 16. Ibid., pp. 335–6. 17. Ibid., p. 381, italics reversed. 18. Ibid., p. 383. 19. Ibid., p. 446: Frederick of Prussia is also a patriot-prince whose ‘Ears are ever open to the Complaints of even the meanest Subjects in his Dominions, who never hears but to redress, and takes Pleasure in humbling the Pride of the Oppressor’. 20. Carnell, Partisan Politics, p. 132; MacKenzie, ‘Eliza Haywood in a “Scrutinizing Age”’, p. 186; Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, p. 117. 21. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 520. 22. A. Lang, Pickle the Spy, or The Incognito of Prince Charles (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), pp. 48, 51. 23. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 524. 24. J. C. Beasley, Novels of the 1740s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), p. 14. He names M. Mitchell’s The Young Juba (1748) and The Amours of Don Carlos (1749), which he identifies as ‘an anonymous secret history’. 25. MR also reports that she ‘has been some weeks in custody of a messenger, who also took up several pamphlet-sellers, and about 800 copies of the book’. For a transcript of the review in its entirety, see Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 757. 26. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, p. 37. 27. Griffiths, letter 13 Jan. 1747, quoted in L. M. Knapp, ‘Ralph Griffiths, Author and Publisher, 1746–1750’, The Library, 4th ser., 20: 1 (1939–40), pp. 197–213, on p. 204. 28. Knapp, ‘Ralph Griffiths’, p. 200. 29. Knapp, ‘Ralph Griffiths’, p. 198. For Haywood’s contribution to the Dawson materials, see above, pp. 000–000. 30. Ibid., p. 198. 31. Ibid., pp. 204, 205. 32. In his petition, dated 25 August, to Newcastle, Griffiths depicts himself as ‘a young Man of no fortune, having a Family to maintain, and no means of subsisting but by my Pen’; see Knapp, ‘Ralph Griffiths’, p. 198. 33. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, p. 384: the ‘farrago of nonsense written about the prince’s movements in 1749 and after testifies to the superlative skill with which he threw off his would-be pursuers.’ See also relevant chapter in Lang, Pickle the Spy, amusingly entitled, ‘The Prince in Fairyland’. 34. E. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, Esq; One of the Gentlemen of the Bed-chamber to the Young Chevalier (London, 1750), p. 16. I follow Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, in accepting Haywood’s authorship but would underscore his reservation, p. 525, that evidence for the attribution is weak.

240

Notes to pages 183–7

35. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 42, p. 6. Cf R. Griffiths, Ascanius; or, the Young Adventurer, a True History (London, 1746), p. 4: Ascanius: ‘This’—the grounds of the writer’s authority, the source of his commission—‘is a Secret which Time only, or some Event yet hid in her dark Womb, will reveal, but I may not’ (4). When examined by the authorities, 9 Jan 1746 [1747], Griffiths was more forthcoming, declaring that the whole was composed ‘from Gazettes & other news Papers & took the Title from a Pamphlett called Alexis or the young adventurer a Novel printed at Edinburgh’: Knapp, ‘Ralph Griffiths’, p. 202. 36. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 17. 37. Lang, Pickle the Spy, p. 51. 38. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, pp. 14-15. 39. Quoted in ‘Conclusion of the view of Lord B—’s letters’, MR ( June 1749), pp. 147-58, on p. 151. 40. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 38; italics reversed. 41. Ibid., p. 13. 42. Ibid., p. 35. 43. Ibid., pp. 18–26. 44. Ibid., p. 19. 45. Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, p. 118. 46. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 26. 47. Sedgwick (ed.), Lord Hervey’s Memoirs, pp. 233–4. 48. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, p. 196. 49. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 32. 50. Ibid., p. 47. 51. Ibid., p. 47; italics reversed. McLynn, Charles Edward Stuart, p. 395, reports that Charles Edward was alive to the possibility of a restoration: “He still hankered after a repeat of the ’45 by other means. The years 1750–3 were full of plots and rumours of plots as the prince cast about for some ingenious means of overthrowing the Hanoverian dynasty’. 52. Haywood, A Letter from H— G—g, p. 48. 53. Ibid., p. 47: A restoration which, to be fair, the narrative allows for: ‘And if the Bulk of the Nation, that is, the Nobility and Gentry, whose Example influences the Nation, should grow desirous of a Change, and ready to repeal what they have done, I am not so old as to despair enjoying in my own Person the Fruits of such a Change, to which the success of my present Enterprise can be no Manner of Impediment.’ 54. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 757. 55. Carnell, Partisan Politics, p. 134. 56. Carswell and Dralle, The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, pp. xvii–iii. 57. See Lockwood, ‘Eliza Haywood in 1749’, p. 476. 58. Carswell and Dralle, The Political Journal of George Bubb Dodington, p. 27. 59. Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, p. 7. 60. The astonishing and hilarious escape via ‘leathern’ machine is meant to mock Catholic credulity. To a modern reader schooled in eighteenth-century obscenity the machine inevitably suggests a gigantic, ambulatory condom. 61. Haywood, The Fortunate Foundlings, pp. 63, 64. 62. Ibid., p. 130. 63. H. D. Weinbrot, ‘Who Said He Was a Jacobite Hero? The Political Genealogy of Johnson’s Charles of Sweden’, Philological Quarterly, 75 (1996), pp. 411–50, on p. 445, n. 19. 64. Haywood, The Fortunate Foundlings, p. 114.

Notes to pages 188–91

241

65. Anne Donnellan in a letter to Samuel Richardson, dated 11 Feb. 1752, writes, ‘Who the author of Betsy Thoughtless is, I don’t know, but his poetic justice I think very bad: he kills a good woman to make way for one of the worst, in my opinion, I ever read of ’: in S. Richardson, Correspondence of Samuel Richardson … Selected from the original manuscripts, bequeathed by him to his family, ed. A. L. Barbauld, (London, 1804), vol. 4, p. 56. 66. E. Haywood, Life’s Progress through the Passions: Or, the Adventures of Natura (London: Gardner, 1748), pp. 130, 132. 67. N. Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 127. 68. E. Haywood, The Invisible Spy. By Exploralibus, 4 vols (London: Gardner, 1755), vol. 3, p. 297. The pseudonym ‘Exploralibus’ in first edition was corrected to ‘Explorabilis’ in subsequent editions. 69. In The Remembrancer, of 8 October 1748, Ralph divided contemporary politics into three parts, summarized by Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 56, thus: ‘first, the ministerial party; secondly, the Jacobite party; and thirdly, “those who are equally apprehensive of Ruin from these Quarters, without any purpose to fortify themselves against either’; he interprets this as ‘indifference towards traditional party identities’. Haywood shared this sense that party identities no longer mattered – except, perhaps, to those who wanted to use the imputation of Jacobitism as a wedge issue. 70. E. Haywood, A Spy on the Conjurer: or, a collection of surprising and diverting stories (London: J. Peele, 1724), p. 131ff. 71. Ibid., p. 133. 72. The strikingly similar execution scenes share a core situation: a woman displays heroic self-control when faced with the execution of a man involved in some fashion in a Jacobite rebellion. For Memoirs of a Certain Island, see vol. 1, pp. 280–2. A similar scene is found in The Lady’s Drawing Room, a revised and expanded version of The Tea-Table that appears on internal evidence to have been prepared by Haywood, which includes a story told by Ethelinda about a woman who first lost father and a husband in ‘the little Struggle the unfortunate King James made for the Preservation of his Crown’ and later a son who got swept up in the ’15. The son was condemned to die a traitor, his limbs ‘mangled, and expos’d to the View of every gazing Spectator on the City-gates’. She too exhibits a heroic self-composure that is described as a ‘Greatness’ of ‘Soul’: see Anon., The Lady’s Drawing Room. Being a faithfull picture of the great world (London: M. Cooper and A. Dodd, 1744), p. 208ff. 73. For the Annesley family connections, see Spedding’s headnote to Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, in Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, especially p. 384. 74. For the Ainsley story see D. Szechi, 1715: The Great Jacobite Rebellion (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2006), pp. 204–5; Sankey, Jacobite Prisoners of the 1715 Rebellion, on p. 14, has a good account of the disgrace of Ainslie’s crime and execution: he ‘excited little sympathy from the people of Edinburgh, who regarded his treason as having been committed for the 100 guineas, not out of any political loyalty. A special gallows was erected so that Ainslie could be hanged over the castle wall on 24 December 1715’. 75. L. J. Rosenthal, ‘Eliza Haywood: Discrepant Cosmopolitanism and the Persistence of Romance’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 3:2 (2007) at www.ncgsjournal.com/ issue32/rosenthal.htm; quotes from and .

242

Notes to pages 193–200

10 Epilogue: The Invisible Spy 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Backscheider (ed.), Introduction, Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, p. xl. Haywood, The Invisible Spy, vol. 1, p. 2. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 580. The Invisible Spy’, MR, vol. 11 (1754), pp. 498–502, on p. 498. Spedding, A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood, p. 581. GM, vol. 24 (1754), pp. 560–66, on p. 560. To Lady Bute, 22 Sept 1755, in Lady M. Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. R. Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965–7), vol. 3, p. 89. The word ‘displeasing’ is inscribed in Lady Mary’s copy. According to I. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 536, Lady Mary found EH’s ‘later novels quite amusing, but did not connect them with Haywood’s earlier work’. P. R. Backscheider, ‘The Story of Eliza Haywood’s Novels: Caveats and Questions’, in K. T. Saxton and R. P. Bocchicchio (eds), The Passionate Fictions of Eliza Haywood: Essays on Her Life and Work (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), pp. 19–47, p. 20. Haywood, The Invisible Spy, vol. 1, p. 10. J. Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (London: Strahan et al., 1774), p. 35. Haywood, The Invisible Spy, vol. 1, p. 22. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 106. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 20. ‘Invisible Spy’, MR, p. 498. For Haywood and the Jew Bill, see Muse, ‘Eliza Haywood and the Jew Bill’. For a good sampling of the topicality of The Invisible Spy, see vol. 4, chapter 2, excerpted in Backscheider (ed.), Selected Fiction and Drama of Elizabeth Haywood, pp. 287–98. Haywood The Invisible Spy, vol. 2, p. 285. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 107. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 186. Ibid., vol. 4, p. 179. Backscheider (ed.), Selected Fiction and Drama of Eliza Haywood, p. xl. Alinda’s story is reprinted in this edition. Harris, A Patriot Press, p. 6. Ibid., p. 6. Rogers, Whigs and Cities, p. 1. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, p. 168. Ibid., pp. 168, 169.

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INDEX

Works by Haywood (EH) appear directly under title; works by others under author’s name. Addison, Joseph, Cato, 26 Adventures of Eovaai (EH), 8, 13, 36, 55, 70, 73–94, 95, 158, 160, 170, 175, 177, 186, 198 and Bolingbroke, 75–9 cross-species sex in, 86–8 and curiosity, 85–8 and Eve, 77, 85–8, 198 feminism, 91–4 Jacobite romance, 91–2, 189 ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, 80–4 and pornography, 82, 86, 90 seduction tropes, 81–91 Agreeable Caledonian, reissued as Clementina (EH), 186–7 Ainslie, Sergeant William, 191 Akenside, Mark, 75 Alexis; or, The Young Adventurer, 182 amatory fiction, 1, 9–11, 23–4, 32–3, 37, 40, 52, 66–7, 75, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 134, 184, 195 Aix-la-Chapelle, Peace of, 157, 161, 162, 170, 178, 183 fireworks display, 162 Anglicanism, 143, 153 Anti-Pamela (EH), 47, 70, 97–8 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, 57 Argyll, John Campbell, 2nd Duke of, 38 Ashbury, Joseph, 19, 21 Astrea, 12, 169–70, 171 Atherton, Herbert, 108 Aubin, Penelope, 23 Augusta of Saxe Gotha, Princess of Wales, 76, 77–8, 92

Backscheider, Paula, 2, 27, 74, 193, 195, 197 Baker, David E., Companion to the PlayHouse, xi, 2, 4, 6, 60, 113 Ballaster, Ros, 6–7, 25, 43, 189 Seductive Forms, 25 Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone, Earl of, 140–1, 142 Banks, John, The Unhappy Favourite, 19 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 122 Barash, Carol, 189 Battestin, Martin and R. R. Battestin, 67 Baxandall, Michael, 108 Beasley, Jerry, 88 Beavor (or Bever), Samuel, 101 Bedford, Gertrude Leveson-Gower, Duchess of, 129 Bedford, John Russell, 4th Duke of, 101, 129 Behn, Aphra, 6, 24, 44, 48, 107, and Astrea, 169 Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, 44 Benedict, Barbara, 85 Bever, Samuel; see Beavor, Samuel Bignon, Jean Paul, see Hatchett, William, Adventures of Abdalla Black, Jeremy, 4, 150 Blouch, Christine, xi, xii, 2–3, 4, 5, 6, 134 Blount, Martha, 42 Blunt, Sir John, 40, 42–3 Bluestockings, EH’s affinities with, 122 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, 1st Viscount, 9, 38, 73–6, 78–9, 81, 88, 89–90, 118,

– 259 –

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155, 157, 158, 164, 165, 172, 174–5, 179, 183, 188, 197, 200; see also Craftsman Dissertation upon Parties, 75, 164 Idea of a Patriot King, 73–4, 79, 81, 89, 158–9, 160, 186 Remarks on the History of England, 78, 83, 123, 125 Bowers, Toni, 90 ‘Boy Patriots’, 71, 74, 75, 80–1 Boyle, Charles, 4th Earl of Orrery, 179 Boyle, Robert, 25 Brereton, Jane, 22–3 Bristol, Elizabeth Hervey (née Fenton), Countess of, 45, 53 Broad-Bottom ministry, 71, 112, 120, 125–9, 152, 157, 158, 167, 171, 179 Broad-Bottom opposition, 4, 8 Brooke, Henry, 75 Brooke, Frances, 179 Brydges, James, 1st Duke of Chandos, 38 Budgell, Eustace, 61 see also Ghost of Eustace Budgell Bullard, Rebecca, 29, 37 Burford, E. J., Wits, Wenches, and Wantons, 104 Burney Collection, 4, 101 Busy-Body, 97–8 Cameron, Dr Archibald, 197 Campbell, Duncan, 26, 170 Canning, Elizabeth, 197 Careless, Betty, 103 Carlton House declaration, 159 Carnell, Rachel, 177, 180, 181 Caroline, Queen, 57–8, 80 Carteret, John, first Earl Granville, 75, 98, 112, 125–6, 127, 157 Case of Orphans Consider’d, 49 Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated, 124 Castlehaven scandal, 45 Cato, Marcus Porcius as Whig icon, 25–6 Cato’s Letters (London Journal), 41, 44, 84 Cavendish, William, 2nd Duke of Devonshire, 38 Centlivre, Susannah, 26 Champion, 10, 97, 98, 116, 117, 163 Chancery, 48–51

Charke, Charlotte, 67, 69 Charles XII (of Sweden), 187 Charles Edward Stuart (the Young Pretender), 148–9, 159, 162, 170, 172, 178, 179, 181–5 Cheshire Cheese, 102 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of, 128, 152, 200 Chetwood, William, 5, 19, 21–2, 24–6, 60 Child, Stephen, 42 Chinese Orphan, 98, 99, 115 Chinese Tale, 98, 104 Churchill, Charles, 26 Churchill, Sarah, 1st Duchess of Marlborough, 26, 70, 74 Cibber, Colley, 169 Provok’d Husband, 56 Cibber, Theophilus, 19, 20 ‘citizen journalism’, 51–2 City Jilt (EH), 32, 33, 48 Clarke, Norma, 102 Cleland, John, 158 Clementina, see Agreeable Caledonian (EH) Clementina Sobieski Stuart, 186 Cobham, Sir Richard Temple, Viscount, 75, 167 Cock, Christopher, 69, 103 “Cock, Captain Samuel” (pseud.), 98 Voyage to Lethe, 98, 104 Cockerell, Mr (of Gloucester), 46–8 Cogan, Francis, 97 Coley, William, 117 Colley, Linda, 168, 171, 179 Colman, George, 106 Comazzi, Giovanni Battista, 59 see under Hatchett, Morals of Princes Common Sense, 118, 150, 161 Compton, Sir Spencer, 50 Corbett, Charles, 63, 98, 109, 115–16, 135, 163–4 Corbett, Charles the younger (later Sir Charles), 115–16, 193 Country patriotism ideology, 8, 156, 159, 164, 174–5 polyvocalism, 179 satire, 35–6, 43, 73, 75–6, 84, 108 Covent Garden, 8, 13, 25, 95, 100, 102–6, 113–14, 121

Index Craftsman, 9, 38, 59, 75, 78, 82, 83, 103, 123, 136, 143, 150, 161, 164, 197 Craggs, James, Jr, 40, 43 Craggs, James, Sr, 36, 40, 41, 42, 43 Crébillon, Claude-Prosper Jolyot de, 60 Le Sopha, 60, 64, 104, 109 Cromarty, George Mackenzie, Earl of, 142 Croskery, Margaret, 33 Cumberland, Duke of, see William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland ‘Curioso Politico’ (pseudo.), 118, 120–1 Curll, Edmund, 25, 61 Venus in the Cloister, 82 Daily Advertiser, 96, 100, 102, 142 Daily Post, 96, 111 Dalinda (EH), 186 Davies, Thomas, 67 Dawson, Bryan, 62 Dawson, James, 145–7, 149, 190 Dawson’s fiancée, 145–7, 149, 190 Defoe, Daniel, 106 Moll Flanders, 23 Of Royall Educacion, 74 Dennis, John, 30 Devonshire, 2nd Duke of, see Cavendish, William Derwentwater, Countess of, see Radcliffe, Anna Maria (née Webb) Derwentwater, 3rd Earl of, see Radcliffe, James Dickinson, H. T., 124 Distressed Orphan (EH), 50–1 Diverting Jumble, 115 Dobson, Austin, 72 Dodington, George Bubb, 8, 14, 27, 38–9, 156, 159–61, 165, 166, 167, 186, 200 Dodsley, Robert, 165 Dorset, Duke of, see Sackville, Lionel Cranfield Double Marriage (EH), 33 Downie, A. J., 27, 71 Dramatic Historiographer (EH), 55 Drury Lane theatre, 20 Dryden, John, 170 Religio Laici, 86 Dublin, xii, 11, 18, 19, 20, 21 Dunton, John, Athenian Mercury, 114 Durham Yard, 155 see also residences

261

ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), 4 Edward the Black Prince, 91 Egmont, John Perceval, 1st Earl of, 69, 160, 161, 171 Edinburgh, 191 Elrington, Francis, 19 Elrington, Thomas, 19 Elwood, John, 66 Epistles for the Ladies (EH), 8, 11, 12, 14, 82, 85, 95, 115, 155–76, 177, 178–81, 186, 190, 201 and Bolingbroke, 155, 157–9, 174–6 and Leicester House, 159–67 and Patriot poetry, 164–9 and patriotism, 157–9, 169–70 and Toryism, 170–2 Equity of Parnassus, 98, 115 Erskine-Hill, Howard, 179, 183 European Magazine, 149 Europe’s Catechism, 96, 98 Evening Post, 23 executions, public, 142–4, 190–1 Kennington Common, 142, 146 Tower Hill, 140, 147 Ezell, Margaret, 199 Fair Captive (EH), 29, 30 Fame or Fama EH’s desire for, 2, 17, 20, 30–2, 33–4, 195 in Fortunate Foundlings, 187–8 frontispiece, 13–14, 108–9, 114, 119–20 Knights of Fame (i.e., Bath), 44 oppositional icon, 13, 34, 79, 106–9, 125–6, 155 see also Sign of Fame, Covent Garden Fantomina (EH), 47, 122, 195 Fatal Secret (EH), 27 Female Free Mason, 60 Female Spectator (EH), 11, 14, 33, 71, 86, 95, 109, 111–32, 152, 156, 160, 163, 173, 175–6, 201 authorship, 113–18 and Broad-bottom ministry, 125–9 and Forty-Five, 129–32 and Spectator, 111 feminism, 12, 91–4, 122, 155, 172–4, 174–6, 201

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Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe, Les Aventures de Télémaque, 74 Fielding, Henry, 5, 7, 10, 13, 14, 22, 23, 38, 55, 56, 60, 65–72, 90–1, 107, 115, 117, 126–7, 136, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148, 161–2, 165, 188, 197, 200 Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, 70 Author’s Farce, 23, 65–7 and Elizabeth Canning, 197 Covent-Garden Journal, 71 Eurydice Hiss’d, 67–8, 69–70 Historical Register, 69, 70 History of Tom Jones, 56, 70 Jacobite’s Journal, 144, 148, 161–2, 165 Jonathan Wild, 90, 147 Joseph Andrews, 67, 70 Tom Thumb, 60 Tragedy of Tragedies, 60 True Patriot, 136, 140, 141 Fielding, Mr., 59 Fielding, Sir John, 102 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, 167 Foord, Archibald S., 199–200 Fortunate Foundlings (EH), 11, 51, 109, 115, 116, 147, 187–8 Fowke, Martha; see Sansom, Martha Fowke Fowler, Sir Richard (‘of the Grange’), xi Fox, Henry, 127 Francklin, Richard, 103 Frederick, Duke of Brunswick-Lunenburgh (EH), 55, 56–8 Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, 8, 57–8, 69, 73–4, 76–80, 99, 107, 156, 158–9, 165, 166, 179, 180, 185, 186 as Adelhu (in Eovaai), 77–8, 89–90 and Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, 183–6 ‘people’s Prince’, 8, 76–9, 92 see also History of Titi Frederick II, King of Prussia, 180 Gage, Thomas, Viscount, 27, 29–30 Gainsborough, Countess of, see Noel, Elizabeth Gainsborough, 4th Earl of, see Noel, Baptist Gardner, Thomas, 109, 115, 116, 136, 137, 151, 155, 162, 163–4, 193–4 Gay, John, 200 Beggar’s Opera, 13, 55, 56

General Advertiser, 140 General Evening Post, 137 Gentleman’s Magazine, 96, 98, 119–20, 131, 135, 157, 164, 194 Genuine Account of the Behaviour, Confession and Dying Words, 146 George II, King of England, 56, 57–8, 76, 78, 80, 82, 90, 99, 125, 143, 169, 181, 185 Gerrard, Christine, 28, 30, 39, 58, 77, 158, 179 Ghost of Eustace Budgel Esq. to the Man in Blue, 96, 99–100 Glasgow Miscellany, 149 Glover, Richard (‘Leonidas’), 14, 75, 156, 158, 159, 160, 165, 167, 171, 173, 180 Leonidas, 165, 167 Memoirs by a Celebrated Literary and Political Character, 167 Gomez, Madeleine Angélique Poisson de, 33, 97 Gordon, George, 135, 136, 150 Gordon, Thomas, 41, 44, 84; see also Cato’s Letters. Goring, Henry; 63, 115, 164, 181 see Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, Esq (EH) Gower, John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl, 126 Granville, George, Lord Lansdowne, 26 Great Piazza Covent Garden, 8, 13, 34, 64, 95, 100–1, 102, 103, 105–6 Gregory, Hester (mother), 46 Gregory, Hester (daughter), 46–8 Gregory, John, Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, 196 Grenville, George, 75, 125 Griffiths, Ralph, 181–2, 185 Ascanius, 181–2 Authentic Copies of the Letters and Other Papers Delivered, 182 Grub-Street Journal, 67 Guthrie, William, 126, 128, 152 Habeas Corpus, 111, 131, 145, 150, 152–3 Haddock, Admiral Nicholas, 99 Harnage Grange, Shropshire, xi Harris, Michael, 112, 115, 117, 150, 152, 153

Index Harris, Robert, 8, 150, 161, 178, 179, 198, 199 Hatchett, William, 5, 6, 13, 20, 22, 25, 55, 56, 58–65, 67, 69, 98, 99, 102, 104, 109, 115 Adventures of Abdalla, 59 Advice from a Mother to her Son, 59 An Appeal to all Lovers of their Country, 61 Morals of Princes, 58, 59 Rehearsal of Kings, 60, 69 Remarkable Cause, 62–3, 64, 98, 102 residences, 61, 62, 63, 102 Rival Father, 20, 55, 59–60, 63, 65–6, 67 Sopha, 104, 109 Have at You All; or, The Drury-Lane Journal, 135 Haymarket theatre see Little Theatre in the Haymarket Haywood, Eliza (née Fowler) actress, xii, 13, 18–20, 56, 65, 67–70 arrest in 1749, 1, 109, 115, 164, 181, 185 and Astrea, 169–70 birth and family, xi Chetwood, relations with, 5, 19, 21–2, 23, 24–5, 25–6 children, xii, 5–6, 61 death, xi Fielding, relations with, 13, 55, 56, 65–72, 197 Hatchett, relations with, 5, 6, 13, 20, 25, 55, 56, 58–65, 102 husband, xii illness (1749), 162, 168, 181 obituary, 113–6 pamphlet shop at Sign of Fame see under Sign of Fame, Covent Garden as poet, 30–1, 165, 167–9 coterie poet, 17, 29–31 the sublime, 18, 30–2 publisher, 96–100, 109 see also Sign of Fame radical populism (1740s), 123–4 residences, xi, xii, 100–6, 155 see also Covent Garden, Durham Yard Savage, relations with, 5, 6, 17–8, 20, 21–22, 26, 29, 30, 31–2, 48, 62, 64, 65, 66

263

Haywood, Valentine, xii Heathcote, George, 173, 179 Hervey, Lady Mary (née Lepell), 45, 53 Hervey, John, Baron Hervey of Ickworth, 76, 184 Hill, Aaron, 5, 13, 18, 28–32, 59, 167–8 Plain Dealer, 29, 31 Hillarian circle, 26, 28–32, 34, 48 History of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (EH), 115, 194 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (EH), 70, 71–2, 103, 115, 122, 188, 194 History of the Highlands and of the Highlands Clans, 149 History of Titi, 79–80 Hogarth, William, 27, 61 Holmes, Richard, 22 Horneck, Phillip, 26 Hosier, Admiral Francis, 99 Howard, Charles, Lord Morpeth, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, 49 Hume, Robert D., 56, 68 Humours of Whist, 98 Hunter, J. Paul, 45 Hurst, Capt., 30 Ingrassia, Catherine, 4, 104–5, 181, 184 Injur’d Husband (EH), 28 Invisible Spy (EH), 115, 188, 190, 193–8, 201 Jacobite romance, 91–2, 189–91 Jacobite sympathies, 7, 12, 26–7, 177–91, and passim Agreeable Caledonian, 186–7 Eovaai, 89, 91–3, 186, 189 Epistles for the Ladies, 158–9, 162, 178–80, 170 Female Spectator, 129–32 Fortunate Foundlings, 187–8 Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, Esq, 181–6 Life’s Progress through the Passions, 188–9 Mary Queen of Scots, 186 Memoirs of a Certain Island, 189–90 Parrot, 133, 136–8, 142–4, 147–9, 153 Spy on the Conjurer, 190 Jacobite uprisings the ‘Fifteen’, 26, 190–1

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the ‘Forty-Five’, 105, 112, 129–32, 133, 149 James Francis Edward Stuart ( James III, the Old Pretender, Chevalier de St George), 186, 187, 188 ‘Jeffrey Broadbottom’ (pseud.); 119, 126–9, 137, 151–2 see also James Ralph and Old England Journal, Jew Bill, 14, 197 Johnson, Capt. C, General History of Pirates, 49 Johnson, Samuel, 12, 64, 102, 104 Johnson, Samuel (of Cheshire), 68 Blazing Comet, 68–9 Hurlothrumbo, 68 Joliffe, John, 197 Jones, Robert W., 144 Keene, Theophilus, 22 Kennington Common, 142, 146 see also executions, public Kilmarnock, William Boyd, Earl of, 140–1, 142, 145 King, Moll, p. 103 Knapp, Lewis M., 182 Kramnick, Isaac, 174 Kubek, Elizabeth, 74 La Belle Assemblée (EH), 33, 55, 97 Lady Flame (in Blazing Comet), 33, 68–9, 195 see also Johnson, Samuel of Cheshire Lady’s Drawing Room (EH?), 109, 241 (n. 72) Lambert, Marquise de, see Hatchett, Advice from a Mother to her Son and Daughter, 59 Lang, Andrew, 183 Layer, Christopher, 27 Lee, Sidney, 2, 4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Le Projet de l’éducation d’un prince, 74 Leicester House opposition, 4, 8, 10, 11, 14, 39, 117, 127, 156–67, 180, 185–6 Lenox, Charlotte, 105 L’Entretien des Beaux Esprits, 33, 55, 97 Leonidas; see Glover, Richard

Lepell, Molly, see Hervey, Lady Mary Letter from H[enry] G[orin]g, Esq (EH), 63, 115, 164, 181–6, 188, 197 Letters from a Lady of Quality to a Chevalier (EH), 25, 27, 30, 38, 159 Letters from the Palace of Fame (EH?), 33 Life’s Progress through the Passions (EH), 188–9 Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, 19, 21, 22, 55, 56 Little Piazza Covent Garden, 103–4, 106 Little Theatre in the Haymarket, 7, 13, 20, 33, 55, 56, 59, 60, 63, 65, 67–70, 71–2, 74, 95, 113, 126–7 Livery Man: Or, Plain Thoughts on Publick Affairs, 123 Lockwood, Thomas, 4, 60, 69 London Evening Post, 96, 99, 128, 136, 147, 156, 179, 183, 193–4 London Gazette, 182 London Journal, 46 Love in Excess, 6, 18, 21–6, 32, 66, 116, 196 Lutwyche, Mr., 49 Lyttleton, George, first Baron, 71, 75, 81, 107, 125, 165, 167, 200 Letters from a Persian, 79 see also, ‘Boy Patriots’ Ma A, The Prude, 24 Macclesfield, Earl of, see Parker, Thomas McDowell, Paula, 199 Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince, 74, 81 Machiavellian corruption theory, 78–9, 83 MacKenzie, Niall, 136, 178, 180, 181 McLynn, Frank, 178 Mallet, David, 29, 75 Mainwaring, Arthur, 26 Manley, Delarivier, 6, 23, 24, 43, 44–6, 52, 197–8 and Astrea, 169 Examiner, 45 New Atalantis, 44–5, 197–8 Marchmont, Hugh Hume Campbell, 3rd Earl of, 172 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (EH), 132, 186 Mayo, Robert, 112 Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (EH), 13, 18, 27,

Index 28–9, 33, 35–53, 66, 82, 84, 107, 130, 147, 159, 169, 189, 197–8 as ‘Country’ satire, 43 contemporaneity of, 44–53 and Martha Blount, 42–3 and patron-seeking, 37–9 and South Sea Bubble, 39–43 and Walpole, 36–8, 40–2 Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman (EH), 109 Memoirs of the Baron de Brosse (EH), 33–4 Mercenary Lover (EH), 32, 33 Merrit, Juliette, 7 Miller, Nancy K., 116 Mist, Nathaniel, 26 Mist’s Weekly Journal, 20, 26, 46, 128 Monod, Paul, 171, 181, 186, 199 Montaud, Monsieur de, 61 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 45, 194 Monthly Review, 158, 168, 181, 185, 194 Morpeth, Lord, see Howard, Charles, 3rd Earl of Carlisle ‘Mrs Novel’, 23, 65–7, 195; see also Fielding, Author’s Farce Myers, Robin, 152

265

Opera of Operas (EH), 60 Orpheus, 24 Orr, Leah, 3, 114 Orrery, Lord, see Boyle, Charles, 4th Earl of Orrery Orwell, George, 1984, 43 Owen, William, 164

pamphlet shops, 104–5 Parker, Thomas, Earl of Macclesfield, 13, 35, 48–51, 53 Parrot (EH), 11, 14, 112, 113, 116, 124, 131, 132, 133–53, 155, 161, 173, 175, 190 Compendium of the Times, 144–6 Cumberland, satire on, 133, 140–2, 148 executions, public, 136–7, 142–4 and Female Spectator, 134–7 Jacobite sympathies, 133, 136–7, 142–4, 145, 148 mercy debate, 133, 142–4 persona, avian, 137–40 Parrot (1728), 136 Parsons, Nicola, 189 Pateman, Carole, 93, 94 Patriot opposition, 8–9, and passim Patriot revival, 157–9, 169 National Journal; or, the Country Gazette, see also Leicester House opposition 133, 135, 136, 150 Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke Patriot Kingship, 9, 58, 73, 158–9, 179, 183, 185–6 of, 166, 182 see also Bolingbroke, Idea of a Patriot Newman, Donald and L. M. Wright, Fair King Philosopher: Eliza Haywood and The Pelham, Henry, 166 Female Spectator, 108 Petter, John, 70 New Opposition Compared with the Old; see Case of the Opposition Impartially Stated Phillips, Hugh, 103 Pilkington, Laetitia, 101, 105, 114 Newman, Aubrey N., 159 Noel, Baptist, 4th Earl of Gainsborough, 59 Pitt, William, 71, 75, 76, 167 Pittock, Murray, 170, 199 Noel, Elizabeth (née Chapman), Countess Pocock, J. G. A., 9, 12, 82, 84, 90 of Gainsborough, 59 Pope, Alexander, xii, 5–6, 12, 21, 27, 28, 38, Nokes, David, 91 39, 40, 42–3, 52, 56, 66, 75, 76, 81, 84, Norwich, 20, 70 101, 107, 126, 165, 194–5, 200 Oakleaf, David, 12, 28 Dunciad, 5–6, 21, 25, 27, 28, 33, 42–3, Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 46 52, 55, 61, 66, 73, 82, 84, 101, 126, Old England Journal, 10, 71, 112, 119–20, 195 126–9, 130, 137, 150, 151–2, 160 Powell, Manushag, 87 Present for a Servant-Maid (EH), 109, 116 Old Whig, 77 press, freedom of, 122–4, 141–2, 149–53 Oldfield, Anne, 22, 26, 59

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Prestonpans, 130 Price, Lady Lucy, 59 Procopius, 44 Pulteney, William, 38, 75, 98, 126, 157, 200 Purser, John, 150 Radcliffe, Anna Maria Webb, Countess of Derwentwater, 147, 189, 190 Radcliffe, James, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater, 147, 190 Ralph, James, 8, 10–11, 14, 72, 80, 117, 126–8, 152, 159–61, 162, 163, 164, 180, 186; Case of Authors by Profession, 10 History of Titi (by JR?), 79–80 Remembrancer, 10, 127, 160–4, 186 see also Champion, Old England Journal Rash Resolve (EH), 21 Raynal, G. T. F., Nouvelles Littéraires, 114 Reed, Isaac, 68 Reeve, Clara, Progress of Romance, 2 Reflections on the Various Effects of Love (EH), 33 Remembrancer; see under Ralph revenge fictions, 17–18, 32, 46–8 Rich, John, 21, 30, 59, 103 Richardson, Samuel, 67 Clarissa, 70, 180 Pamela, 70 Richetti, John, 36 Right Honourable, Sir Robert Walpole Vindicated, 96 Rogers, Nicholas, 171, 199 Rogers, Pat, 42 Rolt, Richard, 168 Rose, Margaret, 132 Rosenthal, Laura, 191 Rumbold, Valerie, 28 Russell St, Covent Garden, 103, 105 Sackville, Lionel Cranfield, first Duke of Dorset, 38 St Amand, James, 103 St Germain, 187 Saint-Hyacinthe, Themiseul de, 79–80 Sambrook, James, 165, 166 Sansom, Martha (née Fowke), 13, 17–18, 23, 28–9, 31–2, 35, 43, 48, 64

Savage, Richard, 5, 6, 17–18, 19, 20, 21–22, 26, 30, 31–2, 48, 61, 64, 66 Authors of the Town, 20, 31 Author to be Lett, 66 Love in a Veil, 22, 26 Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (EH), 15, 28, 33, 66 Shadwell, Thomas, Timon of Athens, 19 Shenstone, William, 149 Sheppard, Jack, 49 Shipley, John B., 80 Sign of Fame, Covent Garden, 8, 13, 64, 95–110 Slaughter’s Coffee House, 61 Smock Alley Theatre (Dublin), xii, 18–19, 20, 21 Snell, Mr, 49 Sopha (EH and Hatchett), 104, 109 South Sea Bubble, 13, 35–7, 39–43, 44 Spectator, 111, 156 Spedding, Patrick, 1, 3, 4, 26, 30, 33, 58–9, 60, 61, 62, 64, 70, 76, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 114, 115, 116, 134–5, 177, 181, 193, 194 Spencer, Jane, 67 Spy on the Conjurer (EH), 169–70, 190, 196 Stage Licensing Act, 7, 55, 65, 70 Starr, Gabrielle, 24, 48 Staves, Susan, 88 Steele, Sir Richard, 26 Sterling, James, 24 Stowe House, Bucks, 74, 75, 80, 158, 179 Strawbridge, Mrs, 38–9 Suarez, Michael, 112 Sublime Character of his Excellency Somebody, 96 Surprize (EH), 26 Swift, Jonathan, 38, 43, 45, 75, 76, 84, 86 Examiner, 45 Gulliver’s Travels, 43, 73, 84, 86–7 taxation as political issue, 123–4 Tea-Table (EH), 31–2 Temple Bar, 116, 164 Thomson, James, 38, 75, 76, 82, 159, 160, 165, 166, 171, 200 Castle of Indolence, 82, 165–6, 170, 171

Index Liberty, 76, 79 Thornton, Bonnell, 135 Tories and Toryism, 6–7, 8–10, 13, 14, 17, 25–7, 36, 44–5, 143, 153, 157, 157–8, 171–2, 177, 178–9 To the Glory of the Rt Honble Sr Robert Walpole, 108 Treadwell, Michael, 97 Trenchard, John, 36–7, 41–2, 44, 84 Vernon, Admiral Edward, 99 Virtuous Villager (EH), 97–8, 104 Voyage to Lethe, 98, 104 Walpole, Horace, 143, 161, 164, 165 Walpole, Horatio, 80 Walpole, Sir Robert, later first Earl of Orford, 7–8, 13, 27, 36–8, 40–1, 48–9, 69, 72, 73, 78–9, 82, 83, 84, 88, 90, 95–6, 99, 112, 119, 178 EH’s opposition overstated, 7, 36–7, 40–2 potential patron, 27, 37–8 Warner, William, 23 Weinbrot, Howard, 187 Wentworth, General Thomas, 99 Westminster Journal, or, the New Weekly Miscellany, 136, 147 Whicher, George Frisbee, xi, 1, 4, 60, 64

267

Whitehall Evening Post, 115–6, 135, 155, 156, 163, 164, 193–4 White’s Chocolate House, 120, 121 Wilks, Robert, 19 Wilks, William, 19, 22 Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury, 127 Wilson, Richard, 184 Wife to be Lett (EH), 19–20, 26, 55, 67, 70, 127–8 William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, 8, 133, 145, 161, 164, 178, 185, 186 Fielding on, 140, 141 Highland policies, 140 Wilputte, Earla, 83, 177, 185 women and the law, 46–53 Worrall, Thomas, 59 Woolf, Virginia, 64–5, 108 Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams, 14, 168–9, 180, 200 Yonge, William, 27 Young, Edward, 38, 159, 160, 165, 166, 173 Night Thoughts (published as The Consolation), 166 ‘Some Thoughts’, 166 Universal Passion, 38 Young Juba, 182