be a stranger to my motives for thus cultivating the friendship of your husband; my fortune is at your disposal. Robinson is a ruined man; his debts are considerable, and nothing but destruction can await you. Leave him! Command my powers to serve you.’15
Mary was mortified at the proposal, but she was also angry and determined enough to face her rival. Perhaps she was spurred by the memory that her mother had had to endure a similar revelation. The encounter in Soho is described in the Memoirs in the style of sentimental fiction. Needless to say, the virtuous young wife vanquishes the profligate mistress. With her novelist’s eye for detail, Mary recalled the dirty servant girl who let her into Miss Wilmot’s apartment, the incriminating new white silk underwear spread out on the bed, her beating heart as she heard Miss Wilmot’s footsteps approach the room.
Mary’s rival was a handsome older woman who was visibly distressed by the presence of her lover’s pregnant young wife. Her lips were ‘as pale as ashes’. She did not deny the charges levelled against her, and as she drew off her gloves to cover her eyes, presumably from shame, Mary noticed Tom’s ring on her finger. Harriet tried to return the ring, to no avail. Mary refused to take it. Harriet said, ‘Had I known that Mr Robinson was the husband of such a woman—’ As Mary rose to leave, Harriet spoke, ‘I never will see him more – unworthy man – I never will again receive him.’ Mary swept out of the room without a further word. As usual, Mary remembered her costume for the occasion, as though she were an actress playing her part: she wore a morning dress of white muslin, with a white lawn cloak and a straw bonnet. Her rival was dressed in a printed Irish muslin and wore a black gauze cloak and a chip hat trimmed with lilac ribbons.16
Devastated by the encounter as Mary claimed to be, she accompanied her husband to Drury Lane that evening with Lord Lyttelton. She concealed her true feelings and participated in the fun with her usual gusto. It was only in the morning that she confronted Robinson. He did not deny the charge. Mary learned that he had had another mistress at the time of their marriage, and that his infidelities were public knowledge. The extent of his debts also became clear to her. Robinson had got himself caught in the invidious position of borrowing money from loan sharks to pay off his creditors. He was deeply involved with King the moneylender. Indeed, ‘the parlour of our house was almost as much frequented by Jews as though it had been their synagogue’.17 Mary’s protestations that she was a ‘total stranger’ to the business transactions were, of course, untrue – John King had the proof of that.
Despite Robinson’s infidelity, he is not depicted in Mary’s narrative as the outright villain of the piece. She presents her husband as weak and impressionable, rather than vicious. It was Lord Lyttelton she blamed. She despised him for the way he treated women, in particular for his contemptuous behaviour towards his estranged wife and his mistress, a Miss Dawson. The press suggested that Mary and Lyttelton were having an affair, a claim that she vehemently denied: ‘he was the very last man in the world for whom I ever could have entertained the smallest partiality; he was to me the most hateful of existing beings’.18
Handsome George Fitzgerald was quite another matter: ‘his manners towards women were beautifully interesting’. He tried to seduce Mary on a warm summer’s evening at Vauxhall. The Robinsons stayed until the early hours of the morning and then while they were waiting for their carriage to take them home, Fitzgerald made his move. A late night quarrel broke out between two men and Robinson and Fitzgerald took off to view the commotion. Mary tried to follow but was soon lost in the throng of people. Later, only Fitzgerald returned. He took Mary towards the exit to wait for her husband. To her alarm, Fitzgerald’s carriage appeared as if out of nowhere and he tried to bundle Mary in. As the door swung open, she noticed a pistol in the pocket of the door. His servants, who were clearly in on the attempted abduction, kept at a discreet distance, while Fitzgerald grabbed Mary around the waist. She struggled free and ran back towards the entrance to the pleasure gardens, where she found her husband. Fitzgerald acted as though nothing had happened: ‘Here he comes!’ he exclaimed with an easy nonchalance, ‘we had found the wrong carriage, Mr Robinson, we have been looking after you, and Mrs Robinson is alarmed beyond expression.’ ‘I am indeed!’ replied Mary.19
She decided to say nothing to Robinson for fear of repercussions: an advanced state of pregnancy was no time to lose one’s husband in a duel. ‘Fighting Fitzgerald’ was a brilliant shot. He killed eighteen men in the course of his duelling career, before being hanged. From that point on, Mary avoided Fitzgerald’s company despite – or because of – his charisma: ‘he was too daring, and too fascinating a being to be allowed the smallest marks of confidence’.
As on so many occasions in the Memoirs, the veracity of this story cannot be taken for granted: the abduction and rape of young women at public places had been a standard twist in the romantic novel ever since the attempted abduction of Harriet Byron in Samuel Richardson’s hugely influential Sir Charles Grandison. We cannot be sure that Mary was not indulging here in a novelist’s licence with the truth.
As with the trip to Bristol and Wales, there is another version of the story of these months – which the Memoirs may indeed have been consciously attempting to erase. Again, it was the Letters from Perdita to a Certain Israelite that made the case for the prosecution. According to John King, Mary was no innocent that first night at the Pantheon. He claimed that she made a play for the three fashionable aristocrats:
At every fashionable Place of Resort, [the Robinsons] appeared as brilliant as any in the Circle; the Extravagance of the Diversions was no Check to their Vanity. At a Masquerade one evening, she was noticed by Lord Lyttelton, Lord Valencia, and Lord Northington; her Pride was highly gratified to be distinguished by Three such fashionable Noblemen; and that an Acquaintance so fortunately begun should not be lost, she wrote the following Note to each Gentleman the next day. ‘My Lord, a Lady in the Character of an Orange Girl that had the Honour of being distinguished by your Lordship last Night at the Masquerade, was a Mrs R—, of Hatton-Garden, who will esteem herself further honoured if your Lordship should condescend to favour her with a Visit.’ – On this singular Invitation, the Gentlemen came, and paid their respective Addresses to her; but it was the intrepid persevering Lord Lyttelton that most succeeded, it was the Splendor of his Equipage that seduced her vain Heart, till at length his Familiarity with her became the Topic of the whole Town. They were continually together at every Place of Amusement; and the Husband trudged after them, as stupid and as tranquil as any Brute of the cornuted Creation.20
King left his readers in no doubt that Mary and Lyttelton had a full-scale affair. He told of how they would engage in amorous dalliance in a closed carriage, with Robinson riding ‘a Mile or Two behind on Horseback’. Far from taking umbrage at the intimacy, the husband ‘continually boasted among his Acquaintance, the Superiority of his Connections, and his Wife’s Ascendancy over every fashionable Gallant’.21 This was the kind of story that gave Robinson a reputation as little better than his wife’s pimp.
A garbled and exaggerated version of this story about Mary making love in a moving coach with the full complaisance of her husband also found its way into the muckraking Memoirs of Perdita published in 1784. Here, though, her high-speed dalliance is with a well-endowed sailor who gives her ‘a pleasure she never could experience in the arms of debilitated peers and nobles’. He takes her four times, with Thomas Robinson riding not on a horse somewhere behind, but on the roof of the very carriage.22
King also claimed that Lyttelton intervened to save Robinson from prosecution when his fraudulent financial
