The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke

most famous masquerade of all was held in 1779 by the notorious brothel-keeper Mrs Prendergast of King’s Place, near St James’s Park. She came up with the idea after revealing in court that the Earl of Harrington had routinely visited her establishment every Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, enjoying the lowest kind of rough girl. This public revelation had sent him into a hypocritical rage (‘he flew into a great passion, stuttering and swearing, waving his cane and shouting, Why! I’ll not be able to show my face at Court!’) not just at the bawd’s casualadmittance that he was a customer, but, far more damagingly, that he was often impotent. 7
    For Prendergast had declared that no one in her establishment could arouse the earl and that she had had to send out for two other girls, who had spent nearly an hour ‘with great labour and much difficulty bringing his Lordship to the zest of his amorous passion’. 8 These two girls, on returning to their own madam, had been so fed up at their less-than-interesting hour and a fee of only three guineas that they had refused to pay their own house 25 per cent commission. The resulting uproar made the newspapers and culminated in Harrington’s outburst. To make amends to him, and to repair the amorous reputation of her own girls, Prendergast organised the ‘Grand Bal D’Amour’ – the lewdest public event that year in a very lewd city.
    She invited subscriptions for the night’s events, to include famous beauties displayed ‘
in puris naturalibus
’. Harrington himself paid over 50 guineas when he heard what she had in mind; in all, she raised over £84,000 in today’s money from Harrington and his friends, all of whom were agog at her plans. She also recruited female aristocrats such as the Hon. Charlotte Spencer (who charged £50 a night), the courtesan Harriet Powell and Lady Henrietta Grosvenor to entice further customers. It is not known whether Harrington’s wife attended, who had an even worse reputation than her husband: her nickname was ‘The Stable Yard Messalina’, after the nymphomaniac wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and she had both male and female lovers.
    The night was a wild success. The ladies danced nude, except for their masks, while an orchestra played facing the wall to spare any blushes the women might still have left. Afterwards the entire throng retired to couches provided ‘to realise those rites which had been celebrated only in theory’. In the midst of the orgy it is said that Lord Grosvenor enjoyed his own wife by mistake, but was so pleased with her performance that the couple – previously separated – were reconciled. After their exertions the guests were treated to a banquet. The evening was deemed such a success that the aristocratic whores donated their fees to the servants, and thelower-class girls were given three guineas each and their cab fare home.
    But masquerades were not the only kind of entertainment that high-class brothels could offer to gallants like Donellan – especially those like him, who were keen to flash their money around. In 1772, the notoriously successful bawd Charlotte Hayes threw a ‘Tahitian Feast of Venus’ to celebrate Captain Cook’s revelation that the natives of the newly discovered Pacific island made love in public. (It was also her commercial response to the opening of the Pantheon.) She invited twenty-three ‘gentlemen of the highest breeding’ to watch as twelve athletic young couples provided a floorshow. Hayes was a canny administrator as well as an impresario: unlike most of her contemporaries she retired with a reputed fortune of £20,000 (£1.27m), all of it gained from gentlemen of breeding blessed with considerably more money than sense.
    The Pantheon opened on 27 January 1772. Occupying a prime position on Oxford Street between Poland Street and Ramillies Street (the site