The Smart is a true drama of eighteenth-century life with a mercurial, mysterious heroine. Caroline is a young Irishwoman who runs off to marry a soldier, comes to London and slides into a glamorous life as a high-class prostitute, a great risk-taker, possessing a mesmerising appeal. In the early 1770s, she becomes involved with the intriguing Perreau twins, identical in looks but opposite in character, one a sober merchant, the other a raffish gambler. They begin forging bonds, living in increasing luxury until everything collapses like a house of cards – and forgery is a capital offence.
A brilliantly researched and marvellously evocative history, The Smart is full of the life of London streets and shot through with enduring themes – sex, money, death and fame. It bridges the gap between aristocracy and underworld as eighteenth-century society is drawn into the most scandalous financial sting of the age.
THE SMART
The Story of
Margaret Caroline Rudd
and the Unfortunate
Perreau Brothers
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Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 ‘Not a robber but a thief’
2 Adventures
3 The Macaroni
4 Danger
5 Suffering Merit
6 The Perreaus on Trial
7 ‘Her present dreadful situation and misfortune’
8 Trial
9 Unhappy Fate
10 To End the Sum
Notes and References
Select Bibliography
Picture Section
Index
Sarah Bakewell is a curator at the Wellcome Library, London. She has written for publications ranging from journals of medical history to Fortean Times.
1. Margaret Caroline Rudd, by William Humphrey, 1775.
2. ‘Mrs Rudd drawn from the life’. Town and country magazine, 1775.
3. Daniel Perreau. London magazine, 1775.
4. Robert Perreau (Chapman), Criminal recorder, 1804–9.
5. ‘Mrs. Margaret Caroline Rudd’, New and complete Newgate calendar, 1795.
6. ‘Mr Dan. Perreau with a drawn knife…’ (Terry). Frontispiece to Forgery unmasked [1775]
7. Admiral Sir Thomas Frankland, Henry Walton, oil on panel, c. 1770. (Private collection, photograph courtesy of Sothebys)
8. Mr Daniel Perreau’s narrative… Title page, 1775.
9. Forgery unmasked… Title page, 1775.
10. ‘Messrs. Robert and Daniel Perreau’, etching, 1776.
11. ‘Mrs Margaret Caroline Rudd at the Bar of the Old Bailey’, 1775.
12. ‘Mrs Margaret Caroline Rudd on her trial’. (Dodd / Tidd). Malefactor’s register, 1779.
13. The London tragedy… 1776. Title and woodcut illustration.
14. “The Diabo-lady”. London magazine, April 1777.
15. Thomas Lyttleton, 2nd Baron Lyttleton., after Thomas Gainsborough, oil on canvas. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
16. Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings, attributed to Hugh Douglas Hamilton, oil on panel, ca. 1801. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
17. James Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, oil on canvas, 1785. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
THE STRANGE STORY of Margaret Caroline Rudd and the Perreau brothers fell into my path entirely by accident. My job then was (and still is) cataloguing early printed books in the medical history collection of the Wellcome Library in London. Cataloguing is a peculiar business, half scholarly and half menial. It requires many ant-sized pieces of detective work: to decide which variant printing you have, or to trace a previous owner from an unreadable signature, or to discover whether a picture really belongs to the book or has just been stuck there because it looks nice. Some days this work is as pleasantly soothing as basket-weaving; other days the joys of all the pedantic pottering wear thin. But then there are also days when you stumble across a genuinely fascinating bit of history, which suddenly makes everything worthwhile. This time the story I found was to give me much more than a minute’s satisfaction, though. It was to start me off on a quest.
Mrs Rudd and I met between the pages of a slightly battered volume of eighteenth-century pamphlets, of which only the first item was relevant to a medical library. It was a satire on the insanity of King George III, poking fun at his confusion and telling a lot of cheeky anecdotes about his conduct – particularly towards young ladies. Not surprisingly, it was anonymous, and so was the pamphlet which followed it: a compilation of Maxims in Prose and Verse published from inside Newgate Prison by one of its inmates. It included a handwritten note from the Newgate sheriff, declaring that the author had ‘behaved himself since he has been prisoner here very properly, and is certainly an object of Charity’.
The third item after this contrasting pair of oddities – the badly behaved monarch and the well–behaved convict – was a short work called Mrs Stewart’s Case, Written by Herself, and Respectfully Submitted to the Enlightened Part of the Publick. The calm title belied the contents, which were twenty-seven pages of sizzling vitriol distilled from long-nursed grievances and poured over one Lord Rawdon, a wealthy relative who had abandoned the writer in her hour of need. Mrs Stewart savaged him mercilessly and invited him to make amends by handing over a large sum of money as soon as possible.
It didn’t take long to find out who this angry lady was. The British Library catalogue listed a ‘Stewart, Margaret Caroline (pseud.)’, author of Mrs Stewart’s Case, and revealed that her real name was Margaret Caroline Rudd. When I looked up Mrs Rudd in the Library of Congress’s name file, a roll-call of other pseudonyms came tumbling down the screen: Mrs Gore, Mrs Perreau, Margaret Youngson, Mrs Potter, Mrs Porter, Caroline de Grosberg, and more. The source given for all this was a 1776 book, itself anonymous: the Authentic Anecdotes of the Life and Transactions of Mrs Margaret Rudd.
I was hooked. What was this woman up to with all these multiple identities and ‘transactions’? And what exactly were the agonies and injustices she bemoaned so bitterly in Mrs Stewart’s Case? The next time I passed by the British Library I ordered up their copy of the Authentic Anecdotes. It was a far from reliable book, being obviously written by someone who knew her personally and hated her guts, but the tale it told was extraordinary, and it revealed a very interesting woman indeed.
There was plenty more to read on Mrs Rudd, including transcripts of the Old Bailey trial which I soon learned lay at the heart of her story, and accounts of the two men whose fate was entangled with hers: Robert and Daniel Perreau. They were just as intriguing as she was. Identical twins with lifestyles and personalities that could hardly be more different, they too had been accused of serious crimes and tried for their lives, and were rarely mentioned without a woeful, chilling adjective: ‘the unfortunate Perreau brothers’.
Addicted, I read my way through everything: pamphlets, trials, newspaper reports, published letters, the Newgate Calendar, gossipy periodicals like the London Magazine. The more I read, the more I realized that I could not take a single word of it at face value. Almost everyone involved had something to say – even Mrs Rudd’s maid wrote her memoirs. They all said it in print at great length and with powerful conviction, but none of them ever quite seemed to be telling the truth – least of all the three stars of the show. On the rare occasions that Mrs Rudd and the Perreaus agreed on the facts of an incident, you could be sure they would disagree about the reasons for it, or the events that had led up to it, or its consequences. Atempting to piece together some sort of consistent picture, I felt more and more like a judge trying a case in which the witnesses were all liars, the documents were all forged and the law was that of Alice in Wonderland. Sometimes I despaired of ever making sense of it, but curiosity kept drawing me further in.
Then came another totally serendipitous discovery. I happened to pick up an anthology of Boswell’s diaries in a second-hand bookshop, and to my astonishment found a long account of a flirtatious, sexually charged meeting between him and Mrs Rudd in 1776. As I learned more – including the full story of their eventual affair – I found myself starting to see Mrs Rudd through Boswell’s eyes. For the first time I could visualize what it might have been like to meet her and be exposed to her formidable charisma. She began to live and breathe in my imagination.
At last, with a stack of papers as tall as an eighteenth-century hairdo, I settled down to shuffle and reshuffle them until a coherent story emerged. Sometimes it was simply impossible to reconcile two conflicting versions and I had to let them both stand, sceptically eyeing one another. But eventually a unified narrative emerged from the chaos and everyone’s viewpoints somehow slid into place. I ended up with a story which felt right, and which might even be something like the truth. Only Mrs Rudd herself remained elusive. Vivid though she was to me, she was if anything a more profound puzzle at the end than at the beginning.
As in any court, my judgement is a creature of the floating world and entirely open to appeal. I hope that readers will enjoy playing detective, advocate, jury and judge just as I did – and that they may even arrive at their own quite different verdicts in this case of the long-suffering Margaret Caroline Rudd and the unfortunate Perreau brothers.
I owe thanks to all the libraries and archive repositories I used, especially the British Library, where the vast majority of the published material is to be found and where I spent most of my time – and of course the Wellcome Library, in which it all began. I am very grateful to my editor Jenny Uglow for taking me on and for providing so much friendliness and wise editorial work; I would also like to thank Marina Warner for her kind encouragement. For reading the book in various stages, spotting blunders and suggesting ways of making it better, I thank my parents Jane and Ray Bakewell, Helen Ficai-Veltroni, Alison Eiffe, Bartek Pawlak, John Symons, and above all Simonetta Ficai-Veltroni, without whose faith and enthusiasm it would never have got beyond the dithering stage.
AT TEN O’CLOCK in the evening of 22 April 1776, the celebrity-chasing writer James Boswell called at 10 Queen Street, Mayfair. It was his third attempt to meet its occupant that day, and each time he’d lost another portion of his nerve. He fidgeted as he waited for the door to open, smoothing his waistcoat and worrying about the impression he would make. Perhaps it had not been a good idea, after all, to spend quite so much of the afternoon idling and quaffing at the dinner table. Still, it was too late to worry about that now.
The coming encounter was the sort of thing Boswell lived for. A mere lawyer and literary dabbler, not yet the famous biographer he was to become, he had a flair for people-collecting. He had already captured some of the biggest stars of his day – Johnson, Wilkes, Rousseau, Voltaire – and he was hungry for more. He was an audacious stalker, an enthusiast, a canny observer of character and a scribbler in notebooks.
And so here he was at the door of ‘the celebrated Mrs. Rudd’, the woman about whom London had been gossiping since her arrest for forgery the previous year – a charge of which she had been acquitted, while her co-defendants Daniel and Robert Perreau had swung for it. Even the American revolutionaries had been obliged to jostle with Mrs Rudd for column inches in the newspapers. Was she guilty or innocent? A tragic heroine, or a seductress who could hypnotize men as lethally as snakes do their prey? No one could agree. Everything about her was discussed and marvelled over: her sufferings in Newgate, her cleverness, her glamorous appearance, her past and present lovers, her bewitching powers of influence. And what of those ‘unfortunate brothers’, the Perreau twins: had they really died for a crime they did not commit? The story was no longer merely news. It had become a part of the city’s mythology.
All this was irresistible to Boswell. He traced Mrs Rudd’s address and came to call. As a writer he wanted to learn the truth about her – but as a man he was also ready to be swept off his feet should the opportunity arise.
On his first visit, that morning, he had been turned away. The maid told him that Mrs Rudd was out until the evening. Boswell left a message, saying that he was a friend of a Mr Macqueen’s, and that he would try later. The day was spent in his habitual visits and conviviality around the town, culminating in a long, leisurely meal with friends. When he returned to Mrs Rudd’s house at half-past nine that night, the maid was more forthcoming.
‘She is just gone out, sir,’ she said. ‘But she will be home in half an hour. You will oblige me if you will walk up stairs. I told her that you called.’
Instead of waiting, Boswell went for a walk. He crossed Piccadilly and sauntered through St James’s to the river, where he stood on Westminster Bridge and watched the boats on the dark water below. He returned for the third time; Mrs Rudd was still out, but this time he agreed to go up and wait in her apartment.
‘I was shown into a dining-room, decent enough, but how poor in comparison of her former magnificence!’ he wrote later that evening.1 ‘A couple of tallow candles gave me light. My fancy began to form fearful suppositions in this solitary situation. I thought the ghosts of the Perreaus might appear. I thought that there might be murderers or bullies in the house.’ He knew that Mrs Rudd had children, but there was no sign of them.
To ease his nerves, he examined the books on her shelves. There weren’t many, and they were an odd mixture: a Court Calendar, two works on logic, a volume of Pope, Johnsoniana, a novel called The Small Talker and some pamphlets relating to her own case. As Mrs Rudd still did not appear, he sat down and browsed through The Small Talker, which he rather liked. It was an amusing but edifying story, warning young ladies against the danger of men who won their affections only in order to seduce and then abandon them.
After a half-hour or so, he at last heard the sound of a lady coming up the stairs, and jumped to his feet. The door opened; Mrs Rudd stepped into the room.
The first impression was not as Boswell had expected. She was ‘a little woman, delicately made, not at all a beauty, but with a very pleasing appearance and much younger than I imagined.’ There was no grand air of ‘dignity or of high elegance.’ Her style of dress was quietly tasteful rather than thrilling: she wore a plain black gown set off by a white cloak and hat.
Boswell’s disappointment was only momentary. Remembering his manners, he apologized for having disturbed her and repeated that he was a friend of Mr Macqueen’s from Scotland.fn1 Although the Macqueen family had not actually sent him, he said, he knew that they would be glad to hear news of her. Mrs Rudd thanked Boswell for his civility and invited him to sit down. He noticed that her voice was pleasant, with an Irish lilt. In some mysterious way she had already managed to put him at his ease, and he began to warm to her.
They sat in chairs facing each other, a short distance apart. ‘How are you now?’ he asked, alluding delicately to the rigours of the trial she had just been through.
‘As well as could be expected,’ she replied, and without further prompting told him the whole story of her sufferings. She described how the Perreaus’ relatives had conspired together and still tried to throw the guilt upon her. The family was like a little commonwealth, she said: spread over England and Ireland, and all united in enmity against her. Boswell noticed with surprise that she pronounced the name ‘Perreau’ rather than ‘Perreau’ or ‘Perroo’ as others did.
He sympathized, and said, ‘It is shocking that the brothers died denying, as they did.’
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It must shock anybody who has any tenderness of conscience. They should have died in silence.’
Her conversation flowed from one thing to another. She spoke of her desire to discover whether her estranged husband, Valentine Rudd, was alive or not. There was a man in Ireland claiming to be Rudd and she wished to go there to find out if it was true. In any case, she thought his long neglect of her set her free from her marriage vows. And she would not think of marrying again after being twice so unlucky – unless perhaps it were someone who could help her, a man of rank and fortune who would bear her up despite all that had happened.
She grew sad and said that her main pleasure lay in reading. Her only resources were in her own mind; without them she should have been very unhappy. Her imprisonment had been harsh. She had been consumptive. And by the time she had emerged from her prison cell into the light, she had been almost blind.
Boswell noticed that her eyes did appear to be weak. Moreover, she had a flushed heat on her cheeks and breathed with difficulty. Yet there was something so attractive about her that he could now see why the newspapers called her an enchantress. Her charms may have been more subtle than he expected, but that only made them more fascinating.
He brought up this subject, saying playfully that she was reputed to possess the power of sorcery. Mrs Rudd smiled, as if to acknowledge that it might have been true in the past, but said that now she could bewitch nobody.
Boswell hastened to object: ‘My dear Mrs. Rudd, don’t talk so. Everything you have said to me till now has been truth and candour.’ He was convinced that she did have such powers, he said, but he begged that she would not enchant him too much, nor change him into any other creature, but allow him to remain a man with at least some degree of reason. He was pleased with this turn of phrase, and described himself later as having spoken ‘with exquisite flattery’.
By now Boswell was getting into the spirit of the thing: he had forgotten his earlier reservations and felt himself to be in that delicious peril he had hoped for. ‘I was as cautious as if I had been opposite to that snake which fascinates with its eyes. Her language was choice and fluent and her voice melodious. The peculiar characteristic of her enchantment seemed to be its delicate imperceptible power. She perfectly concealed her design to charm. There was no meretricious air, no direct attempt upon the heart. It was like hearing the music of the spheres which poets feign, and which produces its effect without the intervention of any instrument, so that the very soul of harmony immediately affects our souls.’
She no longer expected happiness, Mrs Rudd was saying, in tones that moved Boswell’s heart. It was enough for her if she could achieve a state of insensibility to suffering. At this, Boswell rose from his seat.
‘You must not be insensible!’ he cried, and seized her hand to kiss it fervently. There was genuine warmth of feeling in this, but at the same time he could not help but reflect on how splendidly the encounter was going. Writing about the hand-kissing the next day, he remarked, ‘This was all experiment, and she showed neither prudery nor effrontery, but the complaisance, or compliance if you please, of a woman of fashion.’
Mrs Rudd gently withdrew and asked about Robert Macqueen’s eldest daughter: was she married yet? Miss Macqueen promised to be a fine woman, she added. Then she grew wistful and said she liked Scotland; she would like to visit it again. If she did, she would visit the house of Mr Stewart of Physgill,fn2 to which she had been invited several times. She referred to the Earl of Galloway, whom she did not like, and various members of his family: Boswell mildly took issue with some of her judgements, but on the whole felt that her remarks showed insight into human nature. They touched briefly on the wider question of character and how it is formed. Mrs Rudd said that she believed one could be anything one pleased. Boswell nodded approvingly: his great friend Samuel Johnson was of the same opinion.
In short, Mrs Rudd was ‘never at a loss for chit-chat’. Boswell sometimes kept silent on purpose, to see how she would keep the conversation going. ‘She never let the pause be long, but with admirable politeness, when she found that I did not begin again to speak and might perhaps be embarrassed, said something quite easily, so as not to have the appearance of abruptness, to make me feel that I had stopped short, but rather … as if what she then said had grown out of what we had talked of before.’ He was utterly won over. There was no self-conscious effort to be witty. ‘She did not dazzle with brilliance, but cheered one with a mild light.’ Nor, he considered, did she go on inordinately about her suffering or affect a sad face. Instead, she did all she could to be cheerful and companionable.
He noticed that the light seemed to be hurting her eyes and moved the candles to a table further away from her. Then, however, he realized that he could not see the ‘pretty turns of her countenance’ as she talked, and he moved one of them back again, telling her flatteringly why he was doing it.
Mrs Rudd spoke about what she had learned in prison from the experience of solitude. She had chosen to sleep alone in her cell, declining the company of a maid. This was because she wished to spend the time in spiritual reflection. ‘I hope I shall be the better for it,’ she told Boswell. ‘I hope I am wiser.’
‘When you speak of insensibility and of solitude’, said Boswell half jokingly, ‘you might as well be a nun.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Rudd. ‘If it were not for my children I would retire to a convent.’ But in fact, she admitted, she could not bring herself to retreat from the world altogether.
People told many stories about her, she went on. For example, they were now saying that she lived with Lord Lyttelton, although she did not even recognize the man by sight and he had denied the rumour himself. ‘Besides, Lord Lyttelton is not a person with whom one would form a connexion, as he is quite a profligate.’
That wasn’t all, said Boswell with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I heard today that you and the Earl of Loudoun were very well acquainted.’
‘To be sure,’ said Mrs Rudd, ‘if the Earl of Loudoun were to come into this room, I should know him; but as to any intimacy …’
‘It is amazing with what confidence people will tell lies,’ said Boswell. ‘But there is a vanity in being thought to know particularly about a lady so celebrated as you.’
‘People are apt to form an idea of one whom they have never seen. A gentleman told me he had imagined that I was old and ugly!’
‘Why,’ said Boswell merrily, ‘that was very extraordinary, though indeed it may have been owing to the reputation of your enchantment, as witches were said to be old and ugly. You are, however, much younger than I supposed.’
‘But I am not a young woman,’ she said, ‘I am nine-and-twenty, and I do not think that young.’ In fact she was thirty-one.
They talked a little longer, and the conversation again returned to her trial and confinement. As she spoke Boswell noticed that a ‘pretty little foot’ had become visible, and the combination of this sight with the tale of her sufferings excited him. He rose out of his chair, saying, ‘I cannot believe that you have gone through all this. Are you really Mrs Rudd?’
She smiled and said, ‘I am Mrs Rudd.’
‘You must forget all the ill that has passed,’ said Boswell. ‘You must be happy for the future.’ And he ventured to add that he believed love was the remedy she needed.
‘I do not think so,’ she replied gently. And when he began to run on about the happiness to be had from love, she stopped him by saying, ‘But I must now be very cautious in my choice.’
At length Boswell realized it was time to go home. He told Mrs Rudd that he hoped she would forgive the liberty he had taken in waiting upon her. He would be very much obliged if she would allow him to call on her again. She consented and said that she was always at home. Boswell thanked her warmly and took his leave at the door with a kiss, which she received with serenity. There was a moment of confusion while Boswell wondered whether to pursue things further, but he thought better of it and left.
He went home in fine spirits and immediately wrote his account of the meeting, setting down as much of the conversation as he could remember – which was a lot, for Boswell’s memory for dialogue worked like a tape-recorder. He also thought about his own response to Mrs Rudd. Her subtlety and skill in putting him at his ease intrigued him greatly. The whole time he was there, he wrote, ‘I was quite calm and possessed myself fully, snuffed the candles and stirred the fire as one does who is at home, sat easy upon my chair, and felt no confusion when her eyes and mine met. Indeed her eyes did not flash defiance but attracted with sweetness, and there was the reason of the difference of effect between the eyes and those of more insolent or less experienced charmers. She was not a robber but a thief.’ He was pleased, too, that she had never tried to find out his true identity, which he took as a sign of good breeding.
Yet he was not completely fooled by her talk of nunneries and nights of meditation, and guessed that her true vocation lay elsewhere. Although not completely sure of it, he surmised that she was ‘on the town’, although her conversation showed that she had little in common with the brash, earthy prostitutes he was used to.
He finished his account by wondering what Mrs Rudd had made of him, and decided that on the whole he had been very agreeable. ‘I would not for a good deal have missed this scene,’ he wrote. ‘We crowd to see those who excel in any art, and surely the highest excellence of art is the art of pleasing, the art of attracting admiration and fondness.’
Boswell’s observations normally remained in his journal, but sometimes he posted them to friends for their edification and entertainment. This time he decided initially to send his account as a letter to his wife Margaret. The two of them had discussed the trial and he’d told her how curious he was to meet this ‘celebrated Mrs Rudd’. Since the encounter had gone so well, he could hardly resist rattling off the whole story to her. But after reading it through a second time he admitted to himself that it was not wise, and instead sent it to his old friend William Temple, asking him to read it and send it back. (Impressed, Temple wrote back saying, ‘You do excell in painting minds.’)2 By the time the manuscript was returned, Boswell had definitely concluded that it was not suitable for Margaret’s eyes. He annotated it ‘To my wife – but not sent’ and filed it away.
James Boswell was a raw, confusing and extraordinarily human character. Like Rousseau and Goethe, he occupied an intermediate zone between Classical poise and the introspective turbulence of Romanticism. Frequently he seemed childish and absurd, perhaps only because he revealed more of himself than was usual for an eighteenth-century literary gentleman. Open as he was with acquaintances, he was even more honest in his private journal. There he dissected his own emotions with a pitiless blade, as well as noting the oddities of others. No allowances were made for the petty self-deceptions that bear up most people’s vanity. Going to witness an execution in 1768, for example, he found in himself not only horror and pity, but also joy, an emotion which he ascribed to the pleasure of being still alive himself.3 Another time he marvelled at his own hypocrisy in attending church in a genuinely religious state of mind, whilst simultaneously laying plans for seducing women.4
He had been born in 1740 into the Scottish nobility, being distantly related to Robert Bruce and the royal Stuart line on his mother’s side and heir to the sober estate of Auchinleck on his father’s. At the earliest opportunity he fled all that to go to London, arriving there for the first time in 1762. Boswell fell in love with the city, as Samuel Johnson had done before him, and was lucky enough to discover it at a time when it was going through a particularly vibrant period. London in the 1760s was a city of coffee houses and clubs, of gambling dens and gossip-mongers, of pleasure gardens and theatres, a city in which a young man could fling together a witty poem one day and see it printed in his friend’s newspaper the next. It was a city of high-class courtesans in boudoirs and bawdy strumpets on the streets, of dandies, drunkards, seducers, pimps, sharpers and swindlers. It was full of everything that Auchinleck lacked. Boswell adored it, and recorded everything he saw and heard in his journal.
In 1763 he met Samuel Johnson, and after following him around devotedly for a while had the honour of being accepted as an intimate friend. Putting up with constant teasing and abuse, Boswell collected every tic and every mot of the great man. After many years he boiled all this material together in a generous cooking pot of a book and in 1791 recreated Johnson as one of the most vivid characters in literature, an eccentric, domineering titan who is at the same time a maze of all-too-human vanities and vulnerabilities.
Boswell was a people person. ‘Of so soft and warm a complexion am I’, he wrote, ‘that I adhere a little to almost all with whom I come in contact, unless they have qualities that repel me.’5 But in his close relationships he could be callous. His wife suffered more than anyone. He flirted and fornicated indiscriminately, and left written accounts of his adventures lying around where Margaret could not avoid seeing them. From his whoring he caught diseases, which he brought home with him. When drunk (as he often was) he could be aggressive, and once threw a lighted candlestick at her. Yet he did love Margaret and often tormented himself with remorse.
Boswell’s debauchery was out of the ordinary even for an era of general sexual brio. In his early diaries he boasts of his talents, notably his ability to copulate five times in one night.6 He genuinely liked the company of women, although he was no feminist and once wrote, ‘In my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affection with an amiable woman. There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person.’7
By 1776, the year in which he met Mrs Rudd, his sexuality had developed into a frenzied addiction. Terror of venereal infections warred with a total inability to control himself. Between Saturday 30 March and Monday 1 April of that year, for example, a few weeks before his first meeting with Mrs Rudd, his diary relates an absurd sequence of events in which he set out to find a young woman he’d had sex with on Friday night in order to reassure himself that she was not diseased. It had worried him so much that he could not sleep, but in the course of lurking around prostitutes’ alleys he found himself falling into bed with another one. He now had two women to investigate instead of one, but only managed to get embroiled with yet a third – and so it went on, until he had risked his health with four different women and was still none the wiser about the first.8
Boswell’s emotions were as volatile as his sexual impulses. He suffered from bouts of depression and could become intensely involved with people and their problems. One such was John Reid, a condemned sheep thief to whom he gave legal help. He presented a series of petitions to the King and others, pleading for mercy for Reid, and even concocted a scheme for spiriting the body off the gallows and resuscitating him should the hanging take place. He visited him frequently in Newgate (‘When I got home I found several vermin upon me … It was shocking. I changed all my clothes.’)9 and arranged for Reid’s portrait to be painted while he waited to learn his fate. In the event, all the appeals failed and Reid’s execution date was set. Boswell spent the last evening with him and his family, watching as Reid’s youngest son Daniel clambered boisterously over his father, too young to comprehend what was happening. At the fatal hour, Reid was fetched for the customary slow procession to the gallows at Tyburn. His last words in front of the crowd of spectators were, ‘Take warning: mine is an unjust sentence.’ A cap was pulled over his eyes and the noose put around his neck; as he fell he clutched at the ladder for a moment and then let go. The onlookers argued about what they had heard – ‘He says his sentence is just.’ – ‘No. He says unjust.’10 Nothing came of Boswell’s resuscitation plan and afterwards he became profoundly gloomy, tormented with feelings of worthlessness. ‘I was so affrighted that I started now and then and durst hardly rise from my chair at the fireside.’
He recovered quickly from these episodes, but could slip back into melancholy without warning at any time. Johnson, who was also a sufferer, advised him on 22 March 1776 – a month before Boswell’s visit to Mrs Rudd – to ‘take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing’, anything to occupy his mind with things outside himself. ‘I thought of a course of concubinage,’ remarked Boswell mischievously in his journal, ‘but was afraid to mention it.’11 In fact Boswell’s amorous adventures rarely cheered him up, and he worried endlessly about his moral weakness, his excessive drinking and his tendency to make a fool of himself in public. He longed to be more like the teetotal and industrious Johnson, or his own father. Yet both Johnson and the elder Laird of Auchinleck were more feared than liked, whereas everyone had a soft spot for the warm-hearted ‘Bozzy’.
Three weeks went by after Boswell’s first meeting with Mrs Rudd. He called on her on Monday 13 May, but she was not at home; the following evening he tried again and this time managed to see her briefly. As soon as he got home, he sat down and composed some verses in her honour.
On Wednesday Boswell told Johnson about the encounter. He’d already broached the subject in March, saying that he would like to meet the lady if he could. ‘Sir,’ Johnson had replied, ‘never believe extraordinary characters which you hear of people. Depend upon it, they are exaggerated.’12 Boswell ventured some mild disagreement – this was the opposite of his own philosophy – but he did not press the point. However, Johnson later said, ‘I should have visited her myself, were it not that now they have a trick of putting every thing into the newspapers,’ and this time he went so far as to confide that he envied Boswell his acquaintance with Mrs Rudd.13
That same Wednesday Boswell had an enjoyable evening introducing his two great friends Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes to one another for the first time. As it happened, Wilkes was also no stranger to Mrs Rudd. As one of the judges at the Perreaus’ trials, he had made a point of excluding her from giving testimony to ensure that she would not escape trial herself. Indeed, rumours were now afoot that she and Wilkes had once had an affair: love nests in Lambeth were whispered of. Since Wilkes was as famous for his libertinism as for his rabble-rousing politics, it is not surprising that the two names were linked. His apparent vindictiveness towards her in the courtroom had fuelled the speculation. Yet there is no convincing evidence of Wilkes having been her lover, and he and Boswell never seem to have compared notes.
Wilkes was clever and charismatic – Boswell’s favourite sort of person. Although undeniably ugly, with a twisted mouth and a squinting eye, he was considered hugely sexy by women. His capers with the orgiastic Medmenhamite Brotherhood were the stuff of legend. Boswell was proud of the friendship and wrote, ‘When Wilkes and I sat together, each glass of wine produced a flash of wit, like gunpowder thrown into the fire – Puff! puff!’14
Introducing Wilkes and Johnson was asking for trouble. Johnson was as passionate about chastity, temperance and virtue as Wilkes was about vice. The two men were political opposites and each of them was every bit as domineering and intolerant as the other. Moreover, Johnson knew that Wilkes had poked fun at his monumental Dictionary. (After Johnson unwisely declared that ‘H seldom, perhaps never, begins any but the first syllable,’ Wilkes observed in print that ‘the author of this observation must be a man of quick apprehension and a most comprehensive genius’.) Yet, as it turned out, everything went swimmingly. Wilkes made a great performance out of charming Johnson, dancing attendance on him all through dinner: ‘Pray give me leave, Sir – It is better here – A little of the brown – Some fat, Sir – A bit of the stuffing – Some gravy – Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter – Allow me to recommend a squeeze of an orange – or the lemon perhaps may have more zest.’ The legendary grouch could not resist, being also something of a gourmand, and Boswell was delighted with his social coup. That, combined with Johnson’s admission that he envied him his knowledge of Mrs Rudd, really made his day.
The following evening Boswell called on Mrs Rudd again. This time he sang a musical version of the poem he’d written for her. Neither tune nor words survive; we know only the title, ‘The Snake’, presumably a reference to the hypnotic power of her eyes. Mrs Rudd showed him a miniature portrait of herself, which she said had been done while she was in prison awaiting trial – ‘in case of any accident’.15
Boswell was shocked. ‘What, Madam, do you talk with so much ease? Do you mean losing your life?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘What, being hanged?’
‘No, I assure you I should never have been hanged. I had taken care of that.’
He took this to mean that she would have committed suicide sooner than go to the gallows. ‘What! had you resolution to destroy yourself?’
‘I promise you, I am not afraid of death,’ said Mrs Rudd. ‘This is no affectation. I am above it. As I said to a gentleman, “I have too much virtue to be a prude, and too much sense to be a coquette.”’
‘The latter is very true,’ said Boswell. ‘As for virtue, one cannot answer for another’s. One can hardly answer for one’s own. But why too much virtue to be a prude? I’ve seen a virtuous prude.’
‘No, they have only the affectation of it,’ said Mrs Rudd.
Boswell then became somewhat incoherent. He said, ‘You could make me commit murder. But you would be sorry afterwards to have made so ungenerous a use of your power. You have no occasion to be convinced of your power over the human heart. You know it. I dare say you could make me do anything – make me commit murder,’ he repeated. Then he was overcome with emotion, and cried, ‘Is a pretty ankle one of your perfections?’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rudd.
‘Your eyes …’
‘Poets and painters have made enough of them,’ said Mrs Rudd coolly.
He kissed her, and she said, ‘I have heard I have a fine mouth.’ Again and again he kissed her, with passion. Then, as he wrote in his journal: ‘Twice [I said] “Adieu”; at last, “God bless you.’” After leaving her, he went to Johnson’s house.
An afterthought, scribbled in his journal above the heading for that day, reads, ‘Like water corrupted and grown fresh again, her art is become purest simplicity.’
Yet Boswell cooled off abruptly after this and made no further attempt to see Mrs Rudd that year. Now that there seemed to be a real chance of something more than pleasurable flirtation, he lost his nerve. Certainly, she was a formidable proposition. If she was indeed ‘on the town’ she carried a health warning, but more importantly, she had a reputation for being quite literally fatale. She had also made it clear that an intimate connection with her would involve financial responsibilities. Boswell may have stopped seeing her out of loyalty to his wife, but on the other hand he may simply have decided that she was more than he could handle.
When they met again nine years later, however, it was to be a different story. He was older, in his mid-forties rather than mid-thirties, and had a greater sense of his own substance. She had aged too and had more modest expectations. This time Boswell did not back off, and for several months in 1786 he and Margaret Caroline Rudd were to be lovers.
fn1 Robert Macqueen, later Lord Braxfield. Mrs Rudd claimed Scottish ancestry and had visited Scotland, where she said she had made many new friends amongst the nobility.
fn2 John Hathorn Stewart, of the Stewart family to which Mrs Rudd claimed relationship.
SOMETHING NEITHER BOSWELL nor Mrs Rudd seems to have known is that they were related to one another – that is, if her own descriptions of her family background are to be given any credence.
All accounts agree that she was born Margaret Caroline Youngson, in 1744 or 1745, in the small town of Lurgan near Belfast in northern Ireland. Her father was an apothecary of genteel appearance and education, with a small but respectable income.fn1 Her mother was born Isabella Stewart and was also from a family of modest means. However, she had a secret claim to nobility.
There was later to be a lot of confusion about Margaret Caroline’s origins, most of it generated by herself in her attempts to claim direct descent from the noble – indeed royal – families of Scotland. She acquired a certificate from the Lyon Office, authenticator and issuer of Scottish pedigrees, showing descent from a whole line of Stewarts reaching back to one Alexander Stewart, who was ‘progenitor’ of the Stuart royal family.fn2 This much-disputed claim was not entirely imaginary. The name Stewart was certainly in her lineage, but it may not have got there in the way she implied. Alternative sources1 claim that its probable origin was a Scottish officer related to the Earl of Galloway, Major W. Stewart, who had a long affair with her unmarried grandmother while he was stationed in Ireland; the relationship was stable, at least until he was transferred away from the area a few years later, and their two children – Margaret Caroline’s mother and a boy named John – were given his name.
If this was the case, then Margaret Caroline was descended through Major Stewart from James Erskine, Earl of Buchan, whose brother Sir Charles Erskine of Alva was James Boswell’s great-grandfather – and so the two were distant cousins.2 She was indeed loosely related to royalty, as was Boswell. The fact that it was on the wrong side of the sheets was something she was less keen to emphasize. Cleverly fudging the issue, she wrote in one of her pamphlets: ‘It has been erroneously said in the newspapers, that on my examination I declared myself the daughter of a Scotch nobleman; I never said or intimated the like … I am the daughter of an untitled man of fashion, in the true signification of the word, and am infinitely too proud even to wish myself descended from any other family than that which I have the honour to derive my birth from, being convinced that there are very few so noble … none more.’3
The childhood of Margaret Caroline, or simply Caroline as she was often to be known,fn3 was lonely and full of sudden upheavals. She had no brothers or sisters. Her father died while she was a baby, and then her mother when she was eight. The family property, never much to start with and mortgaged to the hilt, was lost. The young orphan was sent to be raised by her maternal uncle John Stewart. He was a fairly prosperous farmer, who rented out land and made a good living from the kelp trade. Uncle John treated Caroline generously but sternly, and when she was older he sent her to a boarding school in Downpatrick to be educated and made suitable for marriage upwards into the gentry. In her pamphlet the following affectionate reminiscence is attributed to him: ‘I was the guardian of her youth (an orphan at eight years old) – she knew no other parent; I ever loved her as such, and she was all the fondest one could wish: sensible, an elegant accomplished mind, graced with every female virtue; beautiful, well-bred, and to use the poet’s words, “of gentle manners, as a soul sincere”.’4
This was not quite the impression she created at school. According to one account she caused so much trouble there that the other children’s parents threatened to take them away if she were not removed. The anonymous author of this report tiptoes with gleeful squeamishness over the specifics of the offence: ‘It would be too indelicate to relate the particulars of a criminal incident that happened between her and one of the servants belonging to this school. The fact, with all its aggravating circumstances, is well known in the town of Downpatrick.’fn4 5 Caroline was expelled; her uncle refused to have her back, and she was sent to live with her grandmother, who was no more able to control the teenage tearaway than anyone else.
Before her expulsion Caroline had been doing well at school, and she certainly learned her letters well enough to wield a formidably eloquent pen in adulthood. Throughout her life she displayed an acute intelligence, and the modest curriculum of girls’ schools was insultingly easy for her to master. But even more striking than her academic attainments were her blossoming powers in the gentle arts of coquetry and charm. She was barely fourteen, claims another anonymous writer, before she was ‘throwing out lures to every young fellow she met with’ – with a high success rate.6
Popular as she was with the young men of Lurgan, Caroline was an outcast in the eyes of the respectable members of the community, especially the female ones. Wherever she went, there was barely concealed pointing and whispering, and everyone knew what she had done – or was rumoured to have done – at the school. She responded defiantly and began plotting her escape. The obvious route out of town lay with the English soldiers of the 62nd Regiment of Foot, currently garrisoned there. A nomadic population of susceptible youths, they had no ties to Lurgan life and did not disapprove of Caroline in the slightest. At seventeen she ran away with one of them, but did not get far before the young man’s commanding officer sent her home. Her second rescuer appeared early the following year, and this time she was more successful. His name was Valentine Rudd.
Rudd was a young lieutenant posted to Ireland on recruitment duty. The son of a prosperous tradesman of St Albans in Hertfordshire, he had risen smoothly through the ranks, buying his way from promotion to promotion according to the usual practice. Despite his success in army life, his personality was far from militaristic. He was easy-going, impulsive and irresponsible; he liked a drink and enjoyed good company. Caroline’s flirtatious vitality perfectly matched his character. She swept him off his feet completely.
The courtship was not a long one. The couple announced their intention to marry just ten days after meeting. Uncle John Stewart gave his formal consent and on 4 February 1762 Valentine Rudd, Lieutenant, and Margaret Youngson, spinster, both giving their residence as the parish of Shankill in the diocese of Dromore, were married in the Anglican church in Lurgan.
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