Brereton continued to taunt her as she paced the room in anguish. ‘How little does such a husband deserve such a wife,’ he said:
‘How tasteless must he be, to leave such a woman for the very lowest and most degraded of the sex! Quit him, and fly with me. I am ready to make any sacrifice you demand. Shall I propose to Mr Robinson to let you go? Shall I offer him his liberty on condition that he allows you to separate yourself from him? By his conduct he proves that he does not love you; why then labour to support him?’3
Mary was almost frantic. ‘Here, Madam,’ continued Brereton, after pausing four or five minutes, ‘here is your husband’s release.’ So saying, he threw a written paper on the table. ‘Now,’ he added, ‘I rely on your generosity.’ She trembled, unable to speak. Brereton told her to compose herself and to conceal her distress from the staff and guests at the inn. ‘I will return to Bath,’ he said, ‘I shall there expect to see you.’ He stormed out of the room, got into his chaise and drove away from the inn door. Mary hurried to show her husband the discharge. All the expenses of the arrest were settled shortly afterwards. They returned to Bath. Robinson did not ask too many questions. Mary warned him against placing his freedom in the hands of a gamester and his wife’s virtue in the power of a libertine, but she knew he would not listen.
Back in Bath, they moved to a different inn, the White Lion. The next afternoon, a Sunday, Mary was astonished to look out of the window and see Brereton parading down the road ‘with his wife and her no less lovely sister’ – the story of the wife’s dangerous illness was a lie. When the Robinsons sat down to dinner, Brereton was announced by the waiter. He ‘coldly bowed’ to Mary and then apologized to Tom, producing a story about how he had only taken action because he was himself being menaced for the money, that he had come to Bristol to prevent rather than to enforce the arrest, and that he had now paid off the demand. Perhaps he would have the honour of seeing the Robinsons later that evening? They did not wait around for him: immediately after dinner they set off for London. Mary dramatizes this story – like that of her meeting with her husband’s first mistress, Harriet Wilmot – so as to emphasize that she was a wronged woman long before any scandalous liaison of her own, but the vivid details have the ring of truth.
Back in London, the Robinsons rented a spacious and elegant house from the actress Isabella Mattocks, in the heart of Covent Garden, near Drury Lane Theatre. They entertained with abandon: ‘My house was thronged with visitors, and my morning levees were crowded so that I could scarcely find a quiet hour for study.’4 Robinson had a lucky streak with the cards and they spent the money on horses, ponies and a new carriage.
Once again the gossip sheets whispered that the rising star Mary and the dashing theatre manager Sheridan were more than friends. A letter to the Morning Post signed ‘Squib’ said ‘Mrs Robinson is to the full, as beautiful as Mrs Cuyler [another actress]; and Mrs Robinson has not been overlooked; the manager of Drury-Lane has pushed her forward.’ Mary responded: ‘Mrs Robinson presents her compliments to Squib, and desires that the next time he wishes to exercise his wit, it may not be at her expense. Conscious of the rectitude of her conduct, both in public and private, Mrs Robinson does not feel herself the least hurt, at the ill-natured sarcasms of an anonymous detractor.’5 She was learning to play the press, an art for which she had good masters in Sheridan and Garrick.
Sheridan continued to pay her marked attention, but she claimed that – in contrast to the behaviour of the libertines – his attitude was always courteous and respectful. He was too good a friend and a man of too much honour to take advantage of her miserable marriage. ‘The happiest moments I then knew, were passed in the society of this distinguished being. He saw me ill-bestowed on a man who neither loved nor valued me; he lamented my destiny, but with such delicate propriety, that it consoled while it revealed to me the unhappiness of my situation.’ And yet she also writes more defensively: ‘Situated as I was at this time, the effort was difficult to avoid the society of Mr Sheridan. He was manager of the theatre. I could not avoid seeing and conversing with him at rehearsals and behind the scenes, and his conversation was always such as to fascinate and charm me.’6 Is there a hint of some impropriety here? In the original manuscript of the Memoirs a long paragraph immediately preceding this remark is heavily deleted – could Mary have confessed something and then thought better of it? On the other hand, it is striking that the author of the anonymous Memoirs of Perdita, who was for the most part eager to accuse her of having affairs with almost every important man she met, restrained himself in the case of Sheridan: ‘Of the nature of their intimacy, though the tattle of the day may have spoke freely, no particulars have transpired; nor should tattle always be regarded.’7
At this time, Mary was increasingly subjected to the ‘alluring temptations’ of noblemen who wished to take her under their protection. Charles Manners, the fourth Duke of Rutland, offered her £600 a year for the privilege. She turned him down. She wanted the patronage of the theatregoing and poetry-reading public, not that of an aristocrat seeking a courtesan. In her Memoirs, Mary refused to name all the men who propositioned her, so as not to ‘create some reproaches in many families of the fashionable world’.8 But she let it be known that advances were made by a royal Duke, a lofty Marquis, and a city merchant of ‘considerable fortune’. Many of these men conveyed their proposals via Mary’s milliners and dressmakers. The scurrilous Memoirs of Perdita, published in 1784 for the purpose of discrediting her, gives graphic details of her purported sexual adventures with both the conceited dandy Lord Cholmondeley and an unnamed heavy-drinking importer of vintage wines. Though not to be trusted, this source provides incidental confirmation of the impression that men from both the established aristocracy and the world of new city money had designs on her.
One of the men who paid her most attention was Sir John Lade, the wealthy heir to a brewery fortune and former ward of Henry Thrale, friend of Dr Johnson. Soon after coming of age, Lade concentrated all his energies on the Robinson household in the Great Piazza. He gambled with Tom and paid court to Mary. Gossip columnists were soon sniffing round the ménage:
A certain young Baronet, well known on the Turf, and famous for his high phaeton, had long laid siege to a pretty actress (a married woman) at one of our theatres; he sent her a number of letters, which after she had read (and perhaps did not like, as they might not speak to the purpose) she sent him back again; a kind of Bo-peep Play was kept up between them in the theatres, and from the Bedford Arms Tavern and her window. The Baronet is shame-faced, and could not address her in person, but by means of some good friend they were brought together, and on Sunday se’en-night set out in grand cavalcade for Epsom, to celebrate the very joyful occasion of their being acquainted. The Baronet went first, attended by a male friend, in his phaeton, and the lady with her husband in a post coach and four, with a footman behind it; the day was spent with the greatest jollity, and the night also, if