In 2011 I made an enjoyable flying visit to Oxford to spend a few hours in the Bodleian Library reading quickly through  a diary that the Library had lately acquired, a 1791 ‘Ladies Pocket Journal’, catalogued as having been written by a ‘Mrs Starke’.

As a result, I was able to identify the writer of the diary not as ‘Mrs Starke’ but as Mrs Mary Crespigny (1750-1812), patron and friend of Mariana Starke (see The Mystery of the Bodleian Diary). But I was  unable to explain why, throughout the year, the male figure dominating the entries, whom in my innocence I assumed to be her husband, was referred to as ‘Starke’.

When I mention that many of the entries were written in a form of cipher, that in my original post I remarked that ‘It only now requires a cryptographer to set to work to decode the sections that she wished to keep safe from prying eyes’, and that, twelve years later, my wish has been granted, you may well see where this is going.

For I am now in possession of both a key to the cipher and a rough translation of the coded entries, which reveals beyond a peradventure that Mary Crespigny had formed ‘an attachment’ to Richard Starke, Mariana’s younger brother. Writing his name – ‘Starke’ – in plain text, Mrs Crespigny notes his presence almost every day – and evening – at Champion Lodge, the Camberwell home she shared with her husband, Claude Crespigny. Even if absent, Starke’s whereabouts are noted. In the coded passages his name is never spelled out, but it is clear that it is ‘Starke’ who is at the centre of Mrs Crespigny’s world. ‘Mr C.’ is occasionally mentioned, invariably favourably, but it is not on him whom her thoughts are concentrated.  

Richard Isaac Starke was baptized at Epsom on 4 January 1768 and so in 1791 was 23 years old, eighteen years younger than Mary Crespigny, and three years younger than her only son, William. A member of the 2^nd Regiment of Life Guards, Starke was promoted lieutenant in May 1791, his responsibilities not, apparently, particularly arduous. At intervals he undertook unspecified guard duties, which, on one occasion in February 1791, involved accompanying the King to the Opera.

The first mention I can uncover linking Richard Starke and Mary Crespigny is a notice in the 7 April 1789 issue of The Times, reporting that ‘At Mrs Crespigny’s temporary theatre at her house at Camberwell Miss Starke and Mr Starke took part in The Tragedy of Douglas’. The other actors, all amateurs, included William Crespigny as ‘Douglas’, the lost son of the heroine ‘Lady Randolph’, who was played by Mrs Crespigny to Richard Starke’s ‘Lord Randolph’. It is likely, however, that Richard Starke and Mary Crespigny were already well acquainted.  Although I assume that it was through his sister that Richard Starke entered Mrs Crespigny’s orbit, I do not know when exactly the two women first met.  Mrs Crespigny was certainly the inspiration for Mariana’s long poem, The Poor Soldier, published in March 1789, a month before the theatricals, and that work must have been a good while in the gestation. In fact, in her dedication, Mariana describes Mrs Crespigny as having ‘long honoured’ her with ‘flattering, though undeserved partiality’. Anyway, even if they had not done so previously, while playing husband and (unhappy) wife in Douglas, Richard Starke and Mary Crespigny had every opportunity to bond.

The following year, in April 1790, Richard and Mariana Starke again took part in Mrs Crespigny’s private theatricals. This time Mariana was the author, the play The British Orphan, never published, is now known only through a lengthy description in The Town and Country Magazine (vol 22, 1790). Mrs Crespigny was again the heroine and was particularly noted by the European Magazine and Theatrical Journal (April 1790) as appearing in three different dresses. Richard Starke played one of two friars, the other being R.J. S. Stevens, a composer who for the production set to music a poem written by Mariana. In his Recollections of a Musical Life  (p.70) Stevens observed that Mrs Crespigny had wanted Caroline, a daughter of Lord Thurlow, to sing in this piece but, when consulted by Lord Thurlow, he (Stevens) disapproved ‘and I was inflexible. Private Theatricals I have ever considered as a species of entertainment very injurious to young minds; destructive of their innocence and modesty; and equally endangering their peace and happiness.’ When quoting this in my previous post about The British Orphan I did not know what I now know. Perhaps the Camberwell frolics had helped shape Stevens’ attitude.   

Despite his Life Guard duties, Richard Starke not only had the time and inclination to take part in theatricals but had also put his pen to work, writing the epilogue to Mariana’s next play, The Widow of Malabar, which was given its first public performance, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, a month after the staging of The British Orphan. The printed edition of The Widow of Malabar carries a dedication by Mariana to Mrs Crespigny, dated 24 January 1791. The first full entry in Mrs Crespigny’s 1791 diary would appear to indicate that she attended a production of The Widow of Malabar on 12 January – and may have gone again on the 19^th. Even if she did not attend in person, she made sure that ‘Miss Starke had a very full house. I sent vast numbers – filled 10 rows of pit & nearly all the Boxes…’ On 16 February she wrote in her diary: ‘My wedding day – been married 27 years – We dined without company – Starke and I went to the Widow of Malabar in the eve.’ How conventional I was to think that on her wedding anniversary it was with her husband that she attended the play.

However, the cipher entries make clear that the ‘attachment’ (as she often refers to it) was tempestuous. She records frequent quarrels and tiffs. For instance, in March,

‘[Starke] and I were very happy till sometime after supper when he grew peevish and we tiff’d. He certainly rather cut and he is then generally out of humour. He said I was the wretchedest creature upon Earth – that he lived a wrong life….We made it up and the next morn were as good friends as ever.’

That is the pattern; it must have been very wearing. Doubtless it was the ‘making up’ that fuelled the affair. I suspect that a not-infrequent marginal mark records the instances of ‘making up’.

However, throughout the year Starke’s ‘propensity for drinking’ and womanising – with at least one prostitute (‘he told me that he had been naughty and taken a dolly out of the street to his own room…he told me he wd not go to any of the houses…what signifies it to me for this proves that his forbearance is at all end as we had not had the least quarrel nor was the least in liquor’) – caused Mary Crespigny great distress. While, as I’ve mentioned, she had no qualms about recording Starke’s constant presence in her plain text diary entries, Mary Crespigny confines her anguish to cipher.  After one incident she wrote in code that ‘I complained to his sister tho very sorry to do so – she behaved vastly well and determin’d if he gave me further uneasiness that his mother [should] speak to him.’ The next words translate as ‘Mrs Stake’ – but can only mean ‘Mrs Starke’. So, here is the clearest evidence that not only was the ‘attachment’ known to Mariana, but that she knew that her brother used her patron ill.

The ’attachment’ was still in place at the end of December 1791 and we do not (for the moment, at least) know how it ended. But end it did.  Richard Starke married in 1798 – not that that would necessarily prove anything – and Mary Crespigny’s only other surviving journal  – covering April 1809-December 1810 – makes no mention of any Starke, either brother or sister. It does, however, frequently allude to her husband, now Sir Claude de Crespigny, and her son, William, who, with his family, received only a couple of mentions in 1791. And, interestingly, it contains no cipher entries. Presumably Mary Crespigny now had nothing to hide.

That this lens through which to peer into late-18^th-century life as actually lived should have been offered by Mary Crespigny is particularly pleasing, as it is as the author of a guide to a young man’s conduct that her literary fame rests.

Letters of Advice from a Mother to her Son was published in 1803, although Mary Crespigny’s dedication, to the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims the letters were originally written for ‘partial instruction to a beloved Son’ and, before publication, ‘remained by me many years unthought of…’ If that were so we could conclude, from the content, that they had been written when William was around 16 or 17 years old – perhaps circa 1782. The surprisingly frank essays treat matters religious, sexual, and socially practical.  Of these one, Letter XXVII, headed ‘Attachment’, appears particularly relevant to Mrs Crespigny’s situation as revealed in her 1791 diary.

 She states:

‘the uneasiness we are entangled in, for which accuse fortune or abuse others, is generally the offspring of our crimes or imprudence; by giving way impetuously to improper passion, we ourselves inflict the wound that is afterwards our torment: -no crime or folly is more likely in the end to produce this torment, than a forbidden attachment, which too often pursues its fatal course, at first, possibly, under the appearance of friendship; – and, by degrees almost imperceptible, it is then suffered to become that forbidden attachment, which, if its insinuating poison is not well guarded against, will certainly destroy the feelings of honour, truth, and virtue, and render the self-devoted victim a wretched slave to duplicity, falsehood, and criminality….Too often the person committing it is one in whom the greatest confidence is placed – the apparent friend of the family, daily partaking of its hospitality, and, with a seared conscience, receiving its favours….To be received into a house, to be treated there by the master of it with hospitality, kindness, and friendship, possibly to receive favours from him…to return all this with duplicity….is such a breach not only of hospitality, but every tie moral and divine…’    

Whether this ‘Letter’ was written in the 1780s, well before the Starke adventure (although who is to say she had not had previous such ‘attachments’?), or whether written nearer the date of publication, in which case we know she was able to speak of ‘torment’ from experience, one might feel that Mary de Crespigny was taking something of a risk in moralising so sternly on the subject. For, eighteen years or so earlier, her ‘set’ could have had few doubts as to the nature of her relationship with the young man who lived in her house and accompanied her around town. In fact, the reviewers gave far more consideration to her views on religion or duelling or idleness than on ‘Female Connexion’, of which ‘Attachment’ was an element. However, The Critical Review (vol 1, 1804) did praise her for taking ‘off the mask which disguises some of her sex; we wish she had done it more generally; but she probably knows nothing of the worst part.’

Contrast that pious sentiment with this October 1791 entry, in cipher, in Mary Crespigny’s diary:

‘ He took me into another room and told me that he had been very foolish that a woman at a window had nodded to him and he went to her – how changed must be he feel towards me and how little attention he pays to my happiness any way – when assaild by strong temptation or when absent and when he has drunk too much he may have some excuse but after what has pass’d between us and while he chuses to continue to live with me he ought to pay some attention to my feel[ings] – shew some forbearance. It wd at any rate be mean[?] in  to continue attach’d to him as I have been for he is clearly tired of me and he now gives way to what dear Mr C says is Libertism. I will suppress my feel[ings] – so far as not to make him an outcast from the house   that wd be ruin to him but I am resolved to conquer my ill placed attachment to him and be only upon common terms with him.’

Knowing that Mary Crespigny was indeed well aware of  ‘the worst part’, I wonder if this makes her observations as to the conduct to be expected of a young gentleman more or less persuasive?

In fact, a reading of the plain and cipher text of  Mrs Crespigny’s 1791 ‘Pocket Journal’ provokes any number of questions around attitudes to morality held by her contemporaries. As such it will surely prove an interesting new resource for historians of late18th-century ‘upper-middling’ society.

Bodleian Reference for Mrs Crespigny’s 1791 diary.

Copyright

All the articles on Woman and Her Sphere and are my copyright. An article may not be reproduced in any medium without my permission and full acknowledgement. You are welcome to cite or quote from an article provided you give full acknowledgement.

With thanks to the anonymous cryptographer who cracked Mrs Crespigny’s cipher and to Nigel à Brassard for generously sharing the resulting key and text.