The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke Page A

now occupied by Marks & Spencer’s Pantheon store at 173 Oxford Street), it had fourteen vast and richly decorated rooms, although its mock Roman and Byzantine style was criticised by some as being cold and ‘church-like’. It was supposed to be not only a more refined version of the rapidly degenerating Carlisle House, but a winter version of the famous Ranelagh Gardens, whose season ran from April to November. During its building, however, the scheme had run into financial trouble, and its founder, Turst, lost his control of it to a committee of eleven men, Donellan among them.
    In late 1771 the committee published a plan of how the Pantheon would be run. They would open three nights a week only, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, to provide musical concerts, balls and card-playing – although high stakes would not be allowed. It seems that the proprietors were trying to establish a respectable venue for the aristocracy, and to this end they devised a system whereby only peeresses or their nominated guests could be admitted – a kind of elite backstage pass on which the lady had to write the name of the person she was recommending.
    The plan backfired in a most dramatic way. On the first night, it was obvious that some of the prized tickets had found their way into the hands of ‘ladies of easy virtue’ (according to the magazine
Town and Country
). The following Wednesday, this was confirmed by the arrival of the actress and singer Sophia Baddeley. Baddeley was wildly famous: the Duke of Ancaster had said that she was ‘one of the wonders of the age’ and Lord Falmouth had told her, ‘Half the world is in love with you.’ One night in 1771, the audience at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket had risen to applaud her beauty in a standing ovation that lasted fifteen minutes. But despite rumours that Lord Melbourne was wont to leave wads of banknotes under her pillow, she was always short of money. When, during a temporary lapse of funds, it was suggested that she cut down her clothing allowance to £100 a year (£6,300), she retorted, ‘Christ, that is not enough for millinery!’ A mercurial spendthrift, spoiled, over-generous, rapaciously sexual and extremely high-profile, the early years of the 1770s belonged to Sophia.
    It says something for Donellan’s own reputation that he knew Baddeley well enough not only to approach her when she entered the Pantheon but to take her to one side and tell the goddess that she was not welcome – a daring move which shows the expectations that the proprietors had of him as well as their own inflated ideas of their influence.
    It did not work. Baddeley was back the following week, this time with George Hanger in tow. Hanger, who was actually the son of Lord Coleraine, would become a favourite of the Prince of Wales, visible in many caricatures and cartoons of the age. In a Boyne drawing of 1786 he is shown in a boat with the Prince being shipped off to Botany Bay as a debtor; in another one he cavorts about while the Prince spanks one of the society beauties, Mrs Sawbridge; in a Townly Stubbs drawing of 1786 Hanger is shown pimping for the Prince and distributing his ‘favours’ in the form of feathers he is taking from a handcart, while the Prince is depicted as a balding cock of the walk.
    In 1772, Hanger was in his early twenties, and Sophia Baddeley was just a little older. At the doors of the Pantheon, surroundedby a crowd of friends who had drawn their swords in defence of Sophia, Hanger demanded that the proprietors explain why she had been excluded. Neither the proprietors nor Donellan were willing to do so in public, and Baddeley was admitted. The
Town and Country
recorded soon afterwards that ‘ladies of easy virtue were indiscriminately admitted without any interrogatories concerning their chastity’. In one stroke, Donellan had been demoted to a mere doorman, and not a very effective one at that.