Introduction

Summary

On 9 February 1841 a play entitled The white milliner debuted at the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden. From the pen of the popular dramatist, Douglas Jerrold, the comedy in two acts was set in the year 1707, and told the story of a woman of quality who was alleged to have established herself as a milliner near London’s Strand, on the New Exchange. There, dressed in white and disguised by a mask of the same colour, the lady ‘supported herself till she was known, and otherwise provided for’. In the preface to the playbill, Jerrold revealed the source of the story to be no less a figure than the antiquarian, man of letters and Whig MP, Horace Walpole, who had claimed that the woman in disguise was Frances Talbot (née Jennings), Jacobite duchess of Tyrconnell (c.1649–1731). Jerrold’s play ‘made a favourable impression on the public’ but was not well received by London’s critics, a circumstance that infuriated him, but which he had anticipated. He accused a ‘small faction’ of ‘despicable partisanship’ in their treatment of his work, but the truth of the matter was less conspiratorial, at least where The white milliner was concerned: the play was just not very good. It nevertheless travelled across the Atlantic in 1842, where a production staged at The New Chestnut Theatre in Philadelphia was deemed ‘trite’ by a critic for The dramatic mirror and literary companion. This less partisan reviewer added that it was ‘in no manner … likely to keep possession of the stage for any length of time’.

While Douglas Jerrold’s production was a failure, it was also a product of an enduring fascination in Regency and Victorian Britain and Ireland with Jacobitism and with the woman known as the ‘duchess of Tyrconnell’. The duchess was an undeniably compelling subject: the daughter of Hertfordshire gentry, her second marriage to the Irishman Richard Talbot precipitated a remarkable ascent to power under the Catholic king, James II and VII. Their rise brought with it wealth and power, with Richard taking charge of the Irish army in 1685, before becoming lord deputy of Ireland in 1687; at which point Frances became vicereine.