The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke Page B

(Baddeley’s glory, incidentally, was to be short-lived. She died aged only forty-four in Scotland, impoverished, debt-ridden and addicted to laudanum. Hanger had set up home with her in Dean Street, but had left her when the money ran out.)
    Donellan’s position as moral guardian of his customers was probably untenable from the start. When the
Town and Country
reviewed his life after his trial, they said that he had been promoted to Master of Ceremonies at the Pantheon because he had been having an affair with the wife of one of the other proprietors, who presumably had pressured for his appointment: ‘It is believed that whilst H … was devoting a building to the gods, Donellan was devoutly sacrificing at the altar of Venus and fabricating for him a pair of antlers’ – in other words, making a cuckold of him. Similarly, an article in the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
of 4 April 1781 says revealingly: ‘[Donellan’s] universal intercourse with polite prostitutes was well known … his connexion with Mrs H … in the vicinity of Rathbone Place is on the recollection of most people. The house, the table, the servants, the carriages of this lady were at the captain’s constant disposal; and it is suspected that his attendances were rewarded in the most liberal way, which enabled him to continue his appearance in public and gave him the opportunity of being acquainted with the unhappy family into which he married.’
    This single article brings Donellan to life in an unparalleled way. The picture of the badly treated but noble patriot painted by Donellan himself to the directors of the East India Company fades; he becomes not only a gallant, a rake and a frequenter of brothels, but a kept man.
    But who was Donellan’s lover, ‘Mrs H’? The
Town and Country
identifies her only as the wife of one of the Pantheon’s proprietors – one of the original builders, in fact. But there was no obvious ‘Mr H’ among either the builders or the known subscribers. The newspaper article suggests that ‘Mrs H’ was perhaps a ‘polite prostitute’ living near Rathbone Place – either the mistress or the wife of a man wealthy enough to run liveried servants and carriages, or a bawd running one of the dazzlingly wealthy brothels in the area, with income in her own right.
    There are several contenders. Rathbone Place is on the north side of Oxford Street directly opposite Soho Square. Teresa Cornelys ran Carlisle House from Soho Square. Lady Harrington, the ‘Stable Yard Messalina’, was one of her patrons. But even if the indefatigably lecherous Lady Harrington was not Donellan’s protector, there were plenty of other candidates among the courtesans and society women who frequented the place.
    Donellan’s lover might have been Charlotte Hayes (then in her late forties), who had set up a successful brothel in Great Marlborough Street in 1761, just south of Oxford Street and a little to the east of Soho Square; but Charlotte was never directly identified with the Pantheon. She and her husband did, however, have many influential friends, including the Duke of Richmond and the Earls Egremont and Grosvenor, all of whom paid 50 guineas a night for Charlotte’s girls. Charlotte and her husband were said to have been worth £40,000 (£2.55 million) in 1769 – more than enough for her to pay for a little pied-à-terre for a favourite captain in Rathbone Place.
    There were other prostitutes who might also fit the bill as Donellan’s lover, though the connection is tenuous at best.
Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies
records two working out of the narrow streets abutting Rathbone Place: Mrs Lowes (‘she expects three guineas for a whole night’) and Miss Townsend (‘she refuses no visitors that will afford a couple of guineas and a bottle’). 9 Though a street of respectable houses to the front, Rathbone Place housed