On the same day an article appeared in the opposition newspaper, the General Advertiser and Morning Post, blaming Rear-Admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, a member of the Admiralty Board and a close ally of Sandwich’s, for failing to follow an order of the fleet’s leader, Admiral August Keppel, a political ally of the Foxite opposition, to engage the French more closely. The article provoked a huge row, which turned officers against one another and divided the navy into bitter factions (contemporaries talked of the Montagus and Capulets). Keppel and Palliser, both MPs, squabbled on the floor of the House of Commons; both were eventually court martialled. Throughout the winter and early spring of 1779 the Foxite opposition kept up the pressure on the government, proposing motion after motion attacking its policy in general and Sandwich in particular. In February it looked as if, for Sandwich at least, the game was up. King George III and Lord North decided to remove him from the Admiralty as a way of appeasing government critics. Only the failure of negotiations for a replacement kept him in office. On 11 February a court martial acquitted Keppel and dismissed Palliser’s charges against the admiral as ‘malicious and unfounded’. That evening a crowd of opposition supporters smashed the windows of Sandwich’s lodgings, frightening his mistress, Martha Ray, who was staying there. The crowd tore off the Admiralty gates, looted Palliser’s house in Pall Mall and attacked the homes of other Admiralty officials.
The government was losing its grip. Lord North sank into a depression that made business difficult to transact – on one occasion Sandwich was sent by the king to cajole him out of bed – while government supporters, thinking the administration doomed, began to absent themselves from important debates in parliament. In April the opposition’s demand for an inquiry into the state of the British and French navies and into the Admiralty’s preparedness for war placed an additional burden on Sandwich’s officials, who had to assemble documents and statistics to be used in his defence. In the following week a debate was scheduled in the House of Lords in which Lord Bristol, a leading spokesman of the opposition, was expected to call for Sandwich’s dismissal. On the afternoon of 6 April Sandwich met with the king to discuss the government’s strategy.
While Sandwich laboured in the Admiralty Board room, struggling to salvage his career, other events that were to have a profound effect on his future were unfolding in another part of London. How much he knew of their background is difficult to tell, though he certainly did not know about the events that took place that day while he was at work.
Some time after the Admiralty gates had opened, a handsome young man knocked at the door of Signor Galli, in Jarvis Street, off London’s Haymarket. The Reverend James Hackman, a tall, thin figure with a high forehead and fine, almost effeminate features, had only a week before been ordained as a priest in the Church of England and given the living of Wiveton, in Norfolk. But that morning he was not bent on clerical business. He demanded to see a letter that Galli had first shown him two days earlier. But the Italian turned him away, telling him that it ‘was out of his power. The letter being no longer in his possession9.’ The letter had been written by Martha Ray, the thirty-five-year-old mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and in it she pleaded with Hackman to ‘desist from his pursuit’ of her, refused to see him and told him she wished to cease all connection with him. Hackman left disappointed, unable to confirm what he did not wish to believe.
Martha Ray had been the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich for more than sixteen years and had borne him nine children, of whom five were living: Robert, born in 1763; Augusta, whose date of birth goes unrecorded; Basil, born in 1770; and two other brothers, William and John, whose birth dates were 1772 and 1773. With such a family it was obvious that Sandwich’s relationship with Ray was no casual affair. She was effectively his common law wife and was known as his public consort. A contemporary described Ray as ‘not what we would call elegant, but which would pass under the denomination of pretty; her height was about five feet five inches; she was fresh-coloured, and had a perpetual smile on her countenance, which rendered her agreeable to every beholder’. Others, especially those who heard her sing, were more impressed. The young clergyman Richard Dennison Cumberland, who listened to Ray’s performances at Hinchingbrooke, spoke of her ‘personal accomplishments and engaging Manner’, describing her as ‘a second Cleopatra10 – a Woman of thousands, and capable of producing those effects on the Heart which the Poets talk so much of and which we are apt to think Chimerical’. Her surviving portraits bear out this description showing a prepossessed and elegantly dressed woman with bright eyes, a slight smile and an expression that betrays considerable strength of character. Certainly James Hackman, who had met her at Hinchingbrooke, had been smitten with her since their first acquaintance in 1775. Nor did it seem likely, despite Ray’s pleas, that the young man would desist in his pursuit of her.
Later that same afternoon Hackman dined with his sister, her husband, the attorney Frederick Booth, and a cousin at the Booths’ house in Craven Street, off the Strand, a few doors down from Benjamin Franklin’s lodgings; he left after eating, promising to return to the family for supper. Striding up Craven Street, he turned left into the Strand, walked through Charing Cross and down Whitehall towards the Admiralty, where Ray and Sandwich had their lodgings. When he arrived he saw the Earl’s coach at the Admiralty’s door. He guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that Martha Ray was going out, and he walked the short distance back towards Craven Street, and stationed himself at the Cannon Coffee House at Charing Cross, so that he could watch the passing traffic. His wait was not in vain. Shortly before six o’clock, Sandwich’s coach swept by, carrying Ray and her companion, Signora Caterina Galli, up the Strand and past its many fine shops, with their first-floor displays of luxuries, cloth and jewels, before turning north into Covent Garden. Hackman followed hastily on foot, watching the two women enter the Covent Garden Theatre at about a quarter past six.
On that Wednesday the theatre was crowded. The star attraction was Margaret Kennedy, a statuesque if somewhat clumsy actress with a fine voice, famed for ‘breeches’ roles in which she played male parts. The evening’s receipts were to go to her benefit, and she was to sing the part of Colin in Rose and Colin, a short comic opera by Charles Dibdin, and the male lead – Meadows – in Thomas Arne’s extremely popular opera, Love in a Village.
Caterina Galli and Martha Ray were more than casual theatre-goers. They might have chosen that evening to go to Drury Lane to see a much-acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but they preferred comic opera and Mrs Kennedy because of their love of music. Caterina Galli was herself a famous singer and music teacher. A pupil of Handel, she had starred in his operas and oratorios in the 1740s and 1750s, usually singing male roles. After a spell back in her native Italy, she returned to London for two seasons before retiring in 1776. Martha Ray, though she had never performed professionally, was also a singer of great accomplishment, with a passion, shared by Sandwich, for Handel. Ray had been tutored by a number of musicians at Sandwich’s expense, and Galli, as well as being Ray’s companion, had sung with her at private concerts arranged by the Earl. It seems likely11 that Sandwich hoped to attend the performance at Covent Garden that evening – he had earlier cancelled a dinner with friends at the Admiralty – but was prevented from enjoying himself because of the press of Admiralty business.
Mrs Kennedy and Love in a Village were apt objects of Martha Ray’s attention. Mrs Kennedy, like Martha Ray, had achieved success through the attentions of a male admirer: she had been spotted by Thomas Arne, singing songs in a pub near St Giles, one of the least salubrious parts of London. Ray, who had been a milliner’s apprentice, owed her present station to the attentions of Lord Sandwich. And Isaac Bickerstaff’s story, set to Arne’s music, was about the perils of love and marriage, especially among social unequals, a topic that much concerned Ray, with her five illegitimate children by Sandwich.
Like most story-lines in comedy, the plot of Love in a Village enjoys a simplicity and happy resolution altogether unlike the unresolved complexities of relationships such as that between Ray and Sandwich. A young gentleman