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Age of wit and hypocrisy
The colourful memoirs of a divorced curate’swife reveal poor morals among the 18th-century clergy, writes Norma Clarke
 Debauched times: Limerick Hell-Fire Club by James Worsdale. Worsdale helped found the Dublin and Limerick Hell-Fire Clubs, devoted to drinking and devilry. Worsdale portrays himself on the left of the painting, with Laetitia and Matthew Pilkington NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND |
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LAETITIA VAN LEWEN was 16 when she married Matthew Pilkington, a curate in the Church of Ireland, in 1725. She gave birth to six children, and was still under 30 when he divorced her in the Dublin church courts. That was astonishing enough. But what followed was even more extraordinary. Mrs Pilkington fled to London, where she managed to make a living by writing. Her work included Memoirs famed for giving one of the clearest pictures of clergy life in that era. As a divorcée, Mrs Pilkington was disgraced. She admitted she had done wrong (she could hardly do otherwise: 12 watchmen were the witnesses when her husband discovered her in the bedroom late at night with another man). But she would not be shamed into silence. What angered Mrs Pilkington most was the hypocrisy of the time: men committed worse sins, but were not punished (her husband, the curate, had a mistress, while the wealthy Bishop Clayton was a notorious womaniser). Women were the ones who got blamed. Men, “our seducers”, she wrote, were also “our accusers”. Mrs Pilkington wrote her memoirs to vindicate herself and blame others. Her main target was her ex-husband: “one of the greatest villains, with reverence to the priest-hood be it spoken, that ever was wrapt up in crape”. The early 18th century was a notoriously bad time for the Church. Concern about corruption, indolence, and general laxity was widespread. Mr Pilkington, for example, once disappeared (telling nobody) for two months to go on a jaunt with his mistress, leaving the parish “quite in an uproar”. Mrs Pilkington had to find a substitute to read prayers, and a recently ordained friend of her brother’s stepped in. One visitor to Dublin was amazed at how much he was expected to eat and drink when visiting senior clergy. His hosts, he told his cousin Horace Walpole, were in thrall to both “Venus and Bacchus”, and even the Archbishop would “toast his nymph with all the gaiety of one and twenty”. Cast out from respectable Anglo-Irish society, Mrs Pilkington became “a Lady of Adventure”, forced to fend for herself. She asked for money so that she could print a volume of her poetry and avoid prostitution — the largest single employment of women, and her likeliest resource. There were many who gave, and good men, like the Bishop of York, the Rt Revd Thomas Herring, sympathised and agreed that the sexual double standard fell most heavily on women. Later, in her Memoirs, Mrs Pilkington recalled those who had not been charitable, such as the bad-tempered Bishop Sherlock, the Lord High Almoner, who left her standing in the cold outside his door in the Temple, telling her she was a foreigner, and complaining that there were enough beggars in England without the Irish coming over. Mrs Pilkington corrected him. Ireland was not a foreign country, but “equally a part of His Majesty’s Dominions”. He called her saucy, proud, and impertinent, and sent her packing. Mr Pilkington refused to pay Mrs Pilkington the small maintenance set by the church courts. He would not allow her contact with her three children; nor would he care for them properly himself (a rumour reached her that he had tried to sell the two youngest into slavery — a little-known aspect of the slave trade was the buying and selling of poor Irish). Mrs Pilkington wrote desperate letters to Ireland, and managed to prevent the sale. Later, her two youngest children made their way to London and found her: Jack, a vagabond, and Betty, 15 and heavily pregnant. Mrs Pilkington, acknowledging she had “less authority to blame her than perhaps another mother”, took her in, but her “saint-like Methodist landlady” had other ideas. They were evicted. Nobody wanted a pauper baby born on the parish. For weeks they tramped the streets, sleeping in foetid night cellars, all the while terrified that Betty’s baby would arrive in the stink and squalor. Rescue came just in time. It was a far cry from Mrs Pilkington’s early married life, when she was the pet of the most famous and outspoken clergyman in the Church of Ireland — Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s, and author of Gulliver’s Travels. Much of Mrs Pilkington’s life as a curate’s wife had been spent among clergymen. She honoured those “possess’d of Christian Charity” whose faith was manifested in their behaviour; but she lambasted the “Ambition, Avarice, Lust, and Cruelty” she witnessed in others. Mostly, Mrs Pilkington’s cheerful narration in her memoirs focused on her once “bosom” friendship with Swift. Her inside knowledge of the eccentric Dean was her most valuable literary commodity: she told of dinners and entertainments when she was often the only woman present, always at a disadvantage in an era that denied women university education. Small, “always a-breeding”, quick-witted, and observant, she impressed well-schooled men with her memory for poetry and the vivacity of her responses. Sophisticated and sexually experienced, she also negotiated the mix of desire and hostility directed at her — as when she had to pretend to be a man and sit with a pipe in her mouth; or pretend she was “a wench” picked up on the road (see below). The success of the Memoirs brought Mrs Pilkington considerable celebrity. She returned to Dublin, hoping to secure her son Jack’s financial future. Although barely 40, she was already mortally ill. The local clergyman asked if she forgave her husband, and she replied that if she died she would forgive him, but if not, not. |
 Widespread problem: Hogarth’s A Midnight Modern Conversation, depicts a common scene of the day: a club of middle-aged, respectable men under the influence of alcohol NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND |
Mrs Pilkington had been sustained in a hard life by unwavering Christian belief. She looked beyond fallible men, including clerics, to direct communion with God. Many of her poems expressed her faith, and the last words she wrote, a prayer found by her deathbed, were testimony to that.
She had written:
Norma Clarke is Professor of English Literature at Kingston University. Queen of the Wits: A life of Laetitia Pilkington by Norma Clarke is published by Faber & Faber (£20 hardback; 978-0-571-22428-9) |
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Extracts from Mrs Pilkington's Memoirs (1748) On Swift: “When the Dean was at Belcamp, at the house of the Reverend Doctor Grattan, he wrote to Doctor Delany to come and dine with him [and bring] mighty Thomas Thumb and her serene Highness of Lilliput, meaning my husband and me. “Accordingly, we went; the Dean came out to meet us, and I, by agreement, hiding my face, Mr Pilkington told him they had picked up a girl on the road, and desired to know whether they might bring her in? He, guessing who it was, said, let her show her face, and if she be likely we’ll admit her. On this I took down my fan and said, O, indeed Sir, I am. Well then, said he, give me your hand. “He led me into a parlour where there were twelve clergymen and said, those fellows coming in had brought a wench with them, but, added he, we’ll give her a dinner, poor devil! And keep the secret. As most of the gentlemen knew me, we were very merry on this odd introduction.” “Mr Grattan had presented the Dean with a small cask of fine ale. On Sunday evening the Dean’s set of intimates came as usual, and he, in high good humour, said he would treat us with a pot of this ale. I had the honour of being entrusted with the key of the cellar. After receiving his commands which I promised punctually to obey I went down, but had scarce opened the door, when Doctor Delany and Doctor Sheridan were with me. O breach of trust unpardonable! We sat down on a bench and each of us drank, but we laughed so heartily at cheating the Dean that he stole down, having some suspicion that where there was a woman and two clergymen there might be a plot, and surprised us. I, in imitation of his servant, told him, the parsons seduced me and I did drink. Pox choke you all, said he.” On the clergy: “I have been accused of writing bitterly against the clergy: I never did, but when they forgot their own high calling.” “However numerous my mistakes in life have been, they have still had most surprising additions made to them, not only by base and unworthy minds, but by such as outwardly profess Christianity, who have fancied it an act of piety to believe and spread of me the most improbable and notorious falsehoods! Nay, so far has their persecuting zeal been carried that they have rendered my honest industry ineffectual; and by depriving me of any means to support life, endeavoured to make me even such a one as they represented me to be. That clergymen should unite in driving to extremity a person who never yet, either in her conversation or writing, offended against the laws of decency or humanity, is apt to make one think they had quite forgot the Christian grace, charity.” “A pious divine gave himself the trouble of coming to my landlord in Michaels Lane, a little after I was parted from my husband, together with his curate, and with great humanity insisted on his turning me out of the house. The landlord asked what I had done, they answered, I was an excommunicated person — a lie; that I had run away from my husband, another lie; that since I had left him I had seven bastards — which was pretty quick, as we had been but seven months asunder — another lie; but when a churchman is in for it, he will out-lie the Devil. At length, these parsons descended so low as to threaten to inform that my landlord’s wife was a Roman, which I believe was another lie; but whether true or false, it was very unbecoming of their characters, either as gentlemen or Christians, to say it. “But I was to be insulted at any rate; for the clergy hang together; and if some did, it would be no great loss. “For when a swinging sin is to be committed, there is nothing like a gown and cassock to cover it.” On clergymen as abusers: “And here I cannot help observing how very few who wear the sacred habit are adorned with any real sanctity of manners. What ambition, avarice, lust and cruelty reigns among them! They are generally the first seducers of innocence, as the holiness of their office gives them free admittance into every family; and as soon as they have made a breach in the tender mind for ruin’s wasteful entrance, they shall be the first to persecute with Ecclesiastical Courts and Spiritual Authority, that very person whom they themselves have taught the way to sin.” On bishops as writers: “Lord, ‘tis a strange thing that all Bishops will need be authors! Now would they avoid manifesting their dullness, we the illiterate might conclude they were men of profound erudition, and that on that account they were advanced to their high station.” |
