Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (26 page)

During the next four years, Hervey continued to have affairs with aristocratic ladies whenever his ship was in port long enough. When the
Phoenix
put in to Genoa in August 1754, for instance, he embarked on an affair with Madame Pellinetta Brignole, a good-looking and intelligent woman of thirty from a distinguished Genoese family. She was an accomplished musician and so captivated Hervey that she remained the principal object of his affections during the remaining time he spent in the Mediterranean. She was, of course, married, a fact that had never deterred him in the past but which, in this case, required them to use some ingenuity. In the first instance, Madame Brignole feigned an inflammation of the eye as an excuse for her to go to bed in a darkened room. Hervey crept into her bedroom and lay down next to her under the thick down quilt. When her husband came to say goodnight to her after supper, Hervey remained hidden under the quilt. After a few anxious moments, the husband went out, “leaving me in the arms of one of the loveliest women that ever was. I lay till near daylight and performed wonders.” At dawn he managed to creep out of the house and return to his lodgings without being seen. On a later occasion, he was compelled to hide under his mistress's bed for two hours before it was safe for him to emerge and embark on another night of lovemaking.

In addition to his affairs with high-society women, Hervey also made a practice of seducing pretty girls in their teens. In May 1752, he attended mass in Lisbon while his ship lay at anchor in the harbor. Spotting a good-looking country girl in the congregation, he had her followed and brought to him. She proved to be “a most lovely piece.” In the same city a year later, he laid siege to Donna Felliciana de Sylvera, a tall and well-built girl of fifteen. He had frequently chatted with her as she sat at her window and at length persuaded her to go to bed with him. According to his diary, she gave him as much joy as ever he could remember. In January 1756, he sailed the
Phoenix
into Port Mahon. He ordered the ship to be prepared for sea because a declaration of war was imminent, but this did not prevent him from flirting with the daughter of the tavernkeeper of the inn where he was staying: “She and I agreed very well, and I kept her all the while, and a sweet pretty creature she was, so that she engrossed my whole time here, and as I lay at the house we had no interruption.”
⁶

This life of sensual indulgence was somewhat curtailed in 1756 when war was declared, and for the next seven years he spent much of his time on active service. He proved a bold and active commander. He served under Hawke in the English Channel, though he missed taking part in the Battle of Quiberon Bay. He was with Admiral Keppel at Belle Isle in 1760 and played a major part in the West Indian campaign in the capture of Martinique, St. Lucia, and Havana. He did find time during his periods of leave in England to have several affairs, most notably with Kitty Fisher, a society beauty and courtesan who was a favorite model for Sir Joshua Reynolds, for whom she sat as Cleopatra. On his return from the West Indies in 1763, he struck up a liaison with Kitty Hunter, the daughter of one of the Lords of the Admiralty. She subsequently bore him a son named Augustus, the only child Hervey ever acknowledged. He grew up to be a charming and impetuous young man like his father. He joined the navy as a midshipman, but at the age of eighteen, he was tragically killed in action during the relief of Gibraltar.

The last great love of Hervey's life was Mrs. Mary Nesbitt. According to an unkind commentator, her origins could be traced to a wheelbarrow, but her exceptional beauty and bright personality gained her entrée into society.
⁷
She married a City banker and, like Kitty Fisher, was painted by Joshua Reynolds. She was consistently unfaithful to her husband and took up with Hervey around 1770. She was to remain with him until his death.

Meanwhile, Hervey's wife, the notorious Miss Chudleigh, had become the mistress of the Duke of Kingston. He was a wealthy and generous man, and she was determined to marry him. It suited her to regard the marriage ceremony she had gone through with Hervey as “such a scrambling shabby business and so much incomplete” that it did not count.
⁸
In spite of a great deal of society gossip about the true state of affairs, she managed to convince the Ecclesiastical Court that she was a spinster, and in March 1769, she married the duke and became the Duchess of Kingston. Hervey had been contemplating divorcing her anyway and kept his own counsel, but when the Duke of Kingston died four years later, the eldest of his heirs, who had been disinherited, decided to contest his will and challenge the legality of his marriage. The lawyers had a field day, and the former Miss Chudleigh found herself having to face a charge of bigamy.

Hervey had now succeeded to the family title as Earl of Bristol, so the trial had to take place before the House of Lords, because if Miss Chudleigh's marriage to Hervey was legal, she was the Countess of Bristol and if not, she was the Duchess of Kingston. Either way, she was a peeress and must be tried by peers. There was so much interest in the case that the trial had to be moved from the House of Lords to Westminster Hall to accommodate all the spectators. The Queen, the Prince of Wales, and most of London society were present to listen to the arguments for the defense and the prosecution. In the end, the Lords ruled that Miss Chudleigh's marriage to Hervey was legal and that she was therefore guilty of bigamy. However, no action was taken against her. She left for the Continent and died in Paris in 1788.

Hervey had wisely left the country and retreated to Nice during the proceedings. At the time of the trial in 1776, he was fifty-one and a man of wealth and property. He died three years later on December 22, 1779, at the family's London house in St. James's Square.

Hervey's amorous adventures make a fascinating case study, but to what extent was he typical of the naval officers of his day? The evidence suggests that he was unusual in terms of the sheer number of women he slept with, but that in other respects his life was not so different from those of other officers with aristocratic connections and wealth derived from prize money or private incomes. On foreign postings, particularly during periods of peace, many officers enjoyed a glamorous social life. Concerts, dances, and parties on board ship and ashore were a common occurrence. Every ship's crew included one or two men who could play the fiddle, and in the eighteenth century, it was common practice for British warships to have a fife and drum band. Some captains ensured that there were enough musicians on board to make up a small orchestra. This practice was not confined to naval vessels. The larger merchant ships, particularly those carrying passengers, often provided musical entertainment for those on board. William Hickey gives us a vivid glimpse of this in his memoirs, as he describes his experiences aboard the East Indiaman
Plassey
in 1769:

Each of the ships 5 English, 4 Swedish, 6 French, 4 Danish, 3 Dutch had an excellent band, consisting of every description of wind and martial instruments, the whole striking up the moment the sun appeared above the horizon and continuing to play for an hour. The same thing was done in the evening one hour previous to sunset. I never heard anything that pleased me more.
⁹

The lavish parties ashore that Hervey attended were not uncommon, as the wealthier naval officers sometimes entertained on a spectacular scale. In the
Portsmouth Telegraph
of April 7, 1800, there is a description of a party hosted by Admiral Edward Russell on the grounds of a nobleman's house near Lisbon. More than 6,000 guests were entertained, and the focal point of the evening was a large marble fountain in the gardens. Russell had arranged for the fountain to be filled with a traditional punch made from 4 large barrels of brandy, 8 of water, 25,000 lemons, 20 gallons of lime juice, 1,300 pounds of fine white sugar, 5 pounds of grated nutmeg, 300 toasted biscuits, and a cask of Málaga mountain wine. A large canopy was erected over the fountain, and a small boat with a young sailor boy floated among
the lemons and grated nutmeg on the surface of the punch. During the evening, the boy rowed around the fountain filling up the cups of
the delighted guests.

And as for affairs with local women, Captain Hervey may have been more promiscuous than most, but there were plenty of other sailors who had flings when they went ashore. Apart from the gossip contained in newspapers and in the letters and diaries of contemporaries, there is revealing evidence of naval officers' extramarital affairs in some of their wills. When Admiral Lord Colvill drew up his will in 1767, he made special provisions for his three illegitimate children, Charles, James Alexander, and Sophia. The two boys had been born in England, but Sophia was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
¹⁰

An interesting source for the amorous activities of naval officers below the rank of admiral is a volume in the Public Record Office that details the deliberations of a body in charge of providing pensions for naval widows.
¹¹
The full title of this body was “The Court of the Commissioners for Managing the Charity for the Relief of Poor Widows of Commission and Warrant Officers of the Royal Navy.” It was set up in 1732 and distributed money that had been deducted from the pay of naval officers. The commissioners met several times a year, and their decisions were duly recorded by a clerk. Usually they were routine, but occasionally, their lordships were faced with a dilemma when two wives applied for the pension of the same man. At the meeting on January 3, 1750, for instance, we find, “Two separate applications of Meliora and Elizabeth Warren claiming each the pension as widow of Thos. Warren late master of the
Invincible. . . .
” At the same meeting, Francis Picton claimed to be the lawful widow of John Picton, late second master of the sloop
Mortar,
but an application was also received from Sarah Picton, who provided proof that she too was his lawful widow. The commissioners also received a petition from Mary Squire and another woman, both claiming they had been married to Captain Matthew Squire, who had been lost on board HMS
Saphire's Prize.

An examination of the records shows that between 1750 and 1800, there were twenty-two cases in which two wives applied for the pension of the same man. The dead men included three captains, five lieutenants, four masters, two pursers, six boatswains, one surgeon, and one carpenter. The charity commissioners' method of deciding between the claims of two wives was to find out which woman had been the first to marry the sailor in question. As long as she could provide sufficient proof of the date of her marriage, she was awarded the pension, and the second wife went without. The records do not provide enough detail to indicate whether the sailors had married their second wife in a foreign port. The names of all the women concerned are common British names such as Mary, Margaret, Ann, Sarah, and Elizabeth, suggesting no more than that the sailors might have had a second bigamous marriage in Britain or in any overseas port with a British population or British descendants.

The sailors' reputation for casual flings in foreign seaports was well established by the eighteenth century, and there are frequent references to this in pictures and poems. During the wars against Revolutionary France, when the activities of the Royal Navy were constantly in the headlines, there was a spate of caricatures in which sailors were featured. A favorite subject was a picture of a cheery young sailor picking up a pretty girl as he came ashore. The caption invariably made use of a nautical phrase along the lines of “A man-of-war towing a frigate into a harbour.” The theme continued to be popular in Victorian times. A charming hand-colored engraving is entitled “The Signal for an Engagement” and consists of two pictures side by side. One shows a sailor in a British seaport with his arm around the waist of a pretty girl, a bonnet tied on her head with ribbons and bows. His other arm holds aloft a purse with his wages as his signal for engagement. The second picture shows a sailor in a tropical setting who is flirting with a dusky maiden adorned with feathers and what appears to be a lion skin. This sailor's signal for engagement is a watch that he dangles before her eyes.
¹²

Sea chanties and ballads made much of the sailors' amorous activities in foreign seaports, and some specifically warned young women against falling in love with a sailor. Typical of the genre is one entitled “Advice to Young Maidens in Chusing of Husbands.” This began,

 

You pretty maids of Greenwich, of high and low degree,

Pray never fix your fancys on men that go to sea;

 

and it went on to remind maidens that being married to a sailor was fraught with problems:

 

Besides the many dangers that are upon the seas,

When they are on the shore, they will ramble where they please;

For up and down in sea-port town they court both old and young:

They will deceive; do not believe the sailor's flattering tongue.

 

The poem ended by advising the maiden to fix her fancy on an honest tradesman who would always be around “to take a share in all the care.”
¹³

Since the majority of sailors were young and unmarried, it was inevitable that they should look for female company whenever they stepped ashore. Jack Cremer, who spent many years as a common seaman in the navy in the mid-eighteenth century, described a lively encounter when his ship sailed into Port Mahon. He went ashore with the ship's carpenter, and they headed for a Spanish brothel situated by an old church. They had plenty to drink and were soon chatting with “two fine, black, swarthy, good-looking girls.”
¹⁴
The girls had already been booked by two English officers, but Jack and his shipmate did not know this. The girls promised them an hour or two in bed, so they took them back to their ship. Their lovemaking was interrupted by the appearance of the two officers, who demanded the women. The officers drew their swords and a fight ensued, during which Jack grabbed hold of one of the officers around his neck and threatened to kill him. The women promptly disarmed the officers, and Jack and his mate won the day.