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INTRODUCTION

While under arrest in 1750 on suspicion of producing a seditious pamphlet, Eliza Haywood insisted that she ‘never wrote any thing in a political way’. Th is was a fl at out lie, of course, but to some it will come as news that an author known for her scandalous novels of sexual passion wrote anything in a political way, never mind that her politics might be the subject of an entire book. Others may be surprised that facts enough exist to fi ll out a full-scale biography, politi-cal or otherwise. Haywood is without question an uncooperative biographical subject. Just four letters survive, each an attempt to secure patronage, and as her bibliographer Patrick Spedding has noted, the manuscript sources total fewer than one thousand words.1 If contemporaries recorded their impressions of Hay-wood their comments have gone missing, with a few notorious exceptions. She was a voluminous writer and readers will fi nd that her imaginative works abound in fascinating self-inscriptions and authorial self-representations, but apart from some prefaces and dedications, mostly from the 1720s, she seldom speaks in pro-pria persona or comments directly on herself. Autobiography was ‘almost the only form of writing not attempted by Eliza Haywood in the course of her long career as an adventuress in letters’, an early biographer noted.2 It seems unlikely at this date that even the most strenuous archival digging will yield up the diary, journal or cache of personal letters that would throw light on the personal or private life. A century ago George F. Whicher wrote that ‘Mrs. Haywood’s one resemblance to Shakespeare is the obscurity that covers the events of her life’.3 We reject today the condescension of an earlier generation, but the stubborn fact remains that little in the way of biographical data survives.

In short, Haywood presents the biographer with something of a conundrum: she is a scandalous fi gure without a personal life. But for over four decades she performed in the public eye as an actress, novelist, translator, playwright, pub-lisher, essayist and political journalist, and that life is amply documented. From the mid-1730s she wrote ‘in a political way’, developing a fl exible feminist-infl ected Patriot politics very much her own which enabled her to comment on contemporary aff airs while continuing to subject female existence to the search-ing examination she began in the amatory fi ctions of the 1720s. Th e present

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biography is scant on startling revelations about the inner life – her thoughts and feelings, even to some extent her ‘true’ political views – but it does pro-vide a great deal of new information about a remarkable public life, including her theatrical ambitions, friendships, political alliances, business associations, households and living arrangements, and it casts new light on her character and sensibility, especially her desire for fame. Th e political biography format, it turns out, is ideally suited to tell the story of a shape-shift ing author who used a variety of means, including political commentary, to make herself heard in the public sphere all the while concealing the personal life behind a succession of masks.

Th e paucity of information on the life has been a theme in Haywood studies from the start. Th e earliest biographical notice, David E. Baker’s indispensible entry in his 1764 Companion to the Play-House, known sometimes as the Biographia Dramatica, remarks upon the obscurity surrounding ‘the Circumstances of Mrs. Heywood’s Life’. Baker then recounts an anecdote, one of few preserved, which speaks to Haywood’s deep apprehension of the power of print to distort, and which may help explain why so little of Haywood’s private life ever entered the public record. According to an unnamed source, Haywood asked that all par-ticulars of her life be suppressed ‘from a Supposition of some improper Liberties being taken with her Character aft er Death by the Intermixture of Truth and Falshood with her History’. Baker reports that ‘she laid a solemn Injunction on a particular person who was well acquainted with all the Particulars of it not to communicate to any one the least Circumstance relating to her’.4 Despite specu-lation, the identity of this ‘particular person’ remains unknown, but the fact that so little real information about the life leaked out either before or aft er her death may attest to her ability to inspire loyalty in her friends.

Baker is the source of nearly all early biographical accounts, including Clara Reeve’s better known Th e Progress of Romance (1785), but starting with Sidney Lee in the late nineteenth century a small but dogged group of scholars has done its best to enlarge upon the information in Th e Companion to the Play-House. Lee’s entry to the original Dictionary of National Biography (1891) presented new information that made its way into a number of early twentieth-century studies.5 Th e most important of these is Whicher’s Th e Life and Romances of Mrs Eliza Haywood, published in 1915, which gathered together just about eve-rything that could reasonably be surmised about the life and more, for as will be seen it introduced some piquant errors into the mix. As late as 1998, Paula Backscheider, one of Haywood’s most attentive modern critics, could write that almost ‘nothing useful is known of Haywood’s life’, and she was right.6 But much has changed since then. Th e modern era in Haywood biographical studies began in 1991 when Christine Blouch, then a graduate student, published in Stud-ies in English Literature a biographical essay entitled ‘Eliza Haywood and the

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Romance of Obscurity’ that vigorously swept away the myth of the runaway wife of a clergyman introduced by Whicher in Th e Life and Romances and brought to light new details relating to her background. Blouch’s essay in eff ect kick-started modern Haywood biographical studies and inaugurated analysis of the role of the politics of literary reputation in shaping the image of Haywood still in cir-culation. Some of the same information reappears in the more fully elaborated biographical essay that opens the six-volume Pickering & Chatto Th e Selected Works of Eliza Haywood that began publication in 2000.7 Th ese are keenly intel-ligent essays and have been welcomed for their new information, but it must be admitted that Blouch was so eager to get anything potentially relevant into print that they can seem somewhat jumbled and stretches of them are unabashedly conjectural. Some of her surmises have opened up whole new pockets of inaccu-racy, or at least dubious inference, especially regarding Haywood’s motherhood and sexual relationships.

Th e next milestone came with Patrick Spedding’s A Bibliography of Eliza Haywood (2004), also from Pickering & Chatto, which unusually for a bib-liographic study presents biographical fi ndings as well as detailed information regarding the publication history of the texts. Th e ‘bio-bibliography’, to use the term Spedding applied to Whicher’s Life and Romances, oft en makes good on its author’s hope that ‘detailed bibliographical analysis would reveal details of Haywood’s life’.8 Th e massive Bibliography, oft en described by reviewers as magisterial – 848 closely printed pages, a seemingly exhaustive record of the publication history of the vast Haywood oeuvre – is indeed a monumen-tal achievement that makes a study such as the present political biography imaginable. However, and this seems inevitable in any developing fi eld, the Bibliography has serious fl aws and these are now beginning to receive atten-tion. Spedding is tendentious, careless or both in his reading of biographical evidence. He uncritically accepts some of Blouch’s questionable conclusions and introduces distortions and misrepresentations of his own, biographical but also bibliographical. Some of his conclusions are now being challenged, nota-bly by Leah Orr in a forceful critique of his methods of attribution, and later in this book I will have occasion to correct his account of Haywood’s activities as a bookseller and publisher.9 Nonetheless, the research and knowledge distilled in the Bibliography provides a platform for the present study and informs virtu-ally every page. His biographical fi ndings and, if Orr is right, even some of the attributions must be used with caution, but the Bibliography remains all the same a magnifi cent achievement that must be regarded as the starting point for any investigation of Haywood’s professional career.

A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood is the fi rst full-length biographical treatment of its subject in nearly a century and the fi rst ever comprehensive

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assessment of her politics. It corrects many misunderstandings, brings to light new information about the life and career and off ers fresh readings of a number of texts, both familiar and unfamiliar. Th at this biography is able to add signifi -cantly to the foundational research of Baker, Lee, Whicher, Blouch, Spedding and many others who will be encountered in this study, including Th omas Lockwood and Catherine Ingrassia, is owing in no small part to the existence of digitized databases that enable access to an astonishing range of materials available via Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), the British Periodicals database, and most importantly for this study, the Burney Collec-tion of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers, said to total nearly one million searchable pages, although those who have struggled with the failures of character recognition endemic to this database may wonder how ‘searchable’ it actually is. Contemporary newspapers have proven especially illuminating. Th e press historian Jeremy Black thought it probable in 1987 that ‘a stress on specifi city is going to be one of the key developments in eighteenth-century historiography’, and it has certainly been a key to advancing my understanding of the nature and implications of Haywood’s political engagements, which are oft en tied to specifi c activities in the press.10 A few big ‘fi nds’ will be reported in what follows, but more important fi nally is the accumulation of new or reinter-preted circumstantial evidence as it permits inferences that can be used to build upon and to some degree reimagine the scanty ‘what-is-knowns’ of the life. Th is combination of inference and informed re-envisioning has made it possible to reassess Haywood in relation to historical contexts that have been only barely considered: pamphlet debates, the oppositional press at mid-century, Patriot politics from the 1730s onward, the Broad-Bottom opposition of 1742–4, the cult of the Patriot King and Bolingbrokean thought more generally and the Leicester House opposition of the later 1740s, to name only a few. Th us recontextualized, Haywood turns out to be a more adroit and better informed author than many have thought, as well as a productive fi gure for study of rela-tions among the press, public opinion, political journalism, feminism and the emergence of the public sphere at mid-century. Haywood was the foremost female ‘author by profession’ of the fi rst half of the eighteenth century and her achievements, especially in the 1740s and 1750s, utterly belie her reputation in some quarters for breathless prose and venal marketplace copycatting. Viewed through the lens of the political engagements reconstructed in this study, many of her works from this period stand as complex and sometimes brilliant works of the creative imagination.

It seems unlikely that another full-scale biography will be attempted any time soon, although I would be happy to be proved wrong on this point, so I have included in A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood a good deal of information

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that is not strictly political, including details relating to her friendships with William Chetwood, Richard Savage, Aaron Hill, Henry Fielding and that rela-tive latecomer on the biographical scene, William Hatchett. I have also tried to correct errors and misunderstandings that have taken root in the Haywood story. Blouch wrote in 1991: ‘Little is known about Haywood’s biography, and brief as it is, a good part of the received account has proved inaccurate’.11 Her pithy assessment remains about as true today as it was two decades ago, and in the interest of giving Haywood a less conjectural life I have attempted in the biographical prolegomenon to distinguish those parts of the received account that are undocumented, patently false or highly suspect from claims that can be shown to have some foundation in the historical record, although it should probably be added that any account, my own included, will require a great deal of inference and inevitably some degree of guesswork.

Every biography is to some extent an argument and because this one is more contentious than many it seems a good idea to lay out some of its principal con-testations. For starters, it seeks to dislodge the image of the ‘romance-writer loose of life and pen’ that has taken hold in many accounts and, in a closely related objective, to push critical imaginings beyond the preoccupation with the cul-tural ‘scandal’ of Haywood’s life and writings.12 If it remains largely the case that we know little, really, about the life, it is also true, and probably more damaging, that we think we know a great deal more than we do. Th e stories told about Haywood in even reputable sources oft en turn out to be driven not by evidence and analysis but by the desire to furnish her with a life commensurate with her signifi cance as a cultural fi gure and her reputation for scandalous disregard for the proprieties. Th e sexual aff air with the ‘dangerous’ poet Richard Savage, the two bastard children from the 1720s, the long-term sexual liaison with William Hatchett – these biographical ‘facts’ turn out to be no more than speculation, some of it fashioned out of the fl imsiest of evidence, and they give a misleading picture of a life that seems, from some angles, not only short on sexual adven-ture but curiously indiff erent to the claims of heterosexual attachment. It may be going too far to argue that Haywood’s life as a single mother who declines to remarry represents a challenge to heteronormativity, although a ‘queered’ view of Haywood is something I would like to see developed, but it can hardly be denied that her reputation as a ‘loose’ if not downright whorish woman rests to an uncomfortable extent on readings of her life fi ltered through the detractions of her enemies as they are abetted by present-day desires to give her an appealingly unconventional history. It is largely owing to that single image in Th e Dunciad of a fore-buttocked ‘Eliza’ with sagging breasts and ‘babes of love’ at her waist that she comes to us today fi tted out with a sexually scandalous past and two illegitimate children, and is it sobering to say the least to consider that this image is the product of the inventive malice of Pope, fuelled by the enmity of his Grub

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Street tell-tale Savage and assembled out of details drawn from the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric conventions. In 1891, before Haywood’s present reputation for sexual licentiousness had taken solid shape, the DNB was careful to trace the origins of her ‘bad’ reputation to the reports of hostile observers and then hastened to supply the other side of the story. ‘Literary enemies’ – Pope and Savage, so far as I can tell – ‘represented that her character was bad, and that she had two illegitimate children’, but her ‘friends’ asserted she had been abandoned by her husband and was obliged to raise their children herself – and this, by the by, is the story as Haywood tells it in one of her letters.13 But it suits the kind of cultural histories that get fashioned today to regard Haywood as signifi er for the ‘scandal’ of the emergence of the woman writer and of the early novel, and so it is oft en the disreputable elements that expand to fi ll the frame.

A further example of the preference for ill-repute is found in a pair of bio-graphical canards revolving around Haywood’s supposedly scandalous maternity. Th e fi rst is the notion, introduced by Blouch as conjecture and taken up as fact by many since, that Haywood and Richard Savage were lovers and that in 1722 or 1723 he fathered the fi rst of two illegitimate children.14 Th e second is that she had a second illegitimate child by William Hatchett, the actor, playwright, and pamphleteer oft en described in recent accounts as Haywood’s long-time com-panion. Th e fi rst is possible if unlikely; the second wildly improbable, as will be seen in a later chapter. Baker in 1764, by comparison, is a model of judicious-ness. He acknowledges her reputation for ‘Gallantry’ but adds the important qualifi cation that he had heard no ‘particular Intrigues or Connections directly laid to her Charge’.15 More than can be said of any other literary fi gure from the period, the Haywood we know, or think we know, is constructed out of the malignity of her enemies and they turn out to be fewer in number than we had imagined. It is one goal of this biography to shift the emphasis away from rep-etition of overly familiar hostile representations to the study of her friendships, alliances and associations, and this change of focus can be so startling as to give the impression that one is encountering Haywood for the fi rst time. At some conjunctures the image of Haywood the grimy Grub Street hack working solo disappears altogether and one glimpses instead a competent and respected pro-fessional pursuing her craft within a network of allies and associates.

Th is biography also questions the entrenched view of Haywood as a ‘Tory’ or ‘Tory feminist’ who expressed her partisan sensibility, ideas and worldview as early as her fi rst novel, Love in Excess (1719–20). Th e notion of the Tory Hay-wood seems to have originated with Ros Ballaster in Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction fr om 1684 to 1740 (1992) who commented, almost in passing, that although Haywood failed to pursue the overt party political program of her Tory predecessors Aphra Behn and Delarivier Manley, she retained in her work the ‘over-arching structure of a Tory ideology’.16 Since then a small but rapidly

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growing contingent of critics has begun to insist that Haywood did write politi-cally in her early amatory fi ction and they are united in agreeing that she wrote as a Tory or, in a more extreme version, a Tory-Jacobite, and assume as a corol-lary that she campaigned against Sir Robert Walpole from the start. It is true that the fi rst half of her career coincided with the rise and fall of Walpole as England’s fi rst ‘prime minister’, to use the derisive phrase applied to the oft -abused ‘Great Man’, and that from the mid-1730s she added her voice to that ‘long tirade’ against Walpole that ‘stands as the fi rst example in British political history of an eff ective long-term propaganda campaign’.17 Th at said, I must say that Haywood’s ‘Toryness’ in the 1720s is less clear to me than it is to others and the anti-Walpole element in her early writing is unquestionably overstated. It is almost startling to discover that her public opposition to the Great Man is largely confi ned to a period of about a year, beginning with the (anonymous) publication of the anti-Walpole satire-romance Eovaai in the summer of 1736 and ending the following spring when her brief career as a player in Fielding’s politically edgy Great Mogul’s company at the Haymarket was brought to a close by Walpole’s Licensing Act.

Haywood’s political positions were complex and shift ing, to some degree situational; the desire to pin a political label on one or another text is under-standable but reductive and tends towards the production of decontextualized readings that in my view create a distorted picture of the political life considered as a whole. Th e aim of this study is to develop the ‘long view’ urged by Juliette Merrit, who compellingly argues that ‘Haywood studies have arrived at a point at which we can begin to take the long view of her career and recognize that she sustained a set of preoccupations and strategies over the course of nearly forty years as a professional writer’.18 To bring these preoccupations and strategies into focus I have found it necessary, with one major exception, to set aside the usual party political labels – the exception being the label ‘Jacobite’ which, as will be seen, presents a special set of diffi culties that require particular examination. But those convenient but not very illuminating terms of opposition, ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’, will receive short shrift in what follows.

It is the political argument of this book that from the mid-1730s until her death in 1756 Haywood engaged energetically and at times vehemently in anti-ministerial satire and journalism. In contrast to her one-time theatrical colleague Fielding, a self-described ‘strenuous advocate’ for the Pelham ministry in the 1740s who at diff erent times wrote from diff erent sides of the ministerial divide, Haywood consistently aligned herself with those excluded from or out of power. Her positioning in the 1720s is more problematic, however, for she plainly solic-ited support from government Whigs and, arguably, even wrote in support of Walpole in her scandal chronicle Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia (1724). As far as I can tell, her anti-Walpole stance begins

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only with Eovaai in 1736, and the politics of this strange text, a satiric Orien-tal seduction tale infused with fairy-tale romance, something of a sport in the oeuvre, are not well understood. Eovaai is certainly an attack on Walpole but, more interestingly in terms of the political engagements in the second half of her writing career, it is our fi rst indication that Haywood, whether for pay or out of conviction, wrote on behalf of the Patriot propaganda campaign to foster sup-port for the ‘people’s Prince’, Frederick Lewis, the Prince of Wales.

My sense that Haywood cannot be easily consigned to any particular party has the support of that school of political history that stresses the subordination of party identities at mid-century to that variant of ‘Country’ ideology known as Patriotism, to adopt the terminology of newspaper historian Robert Harris. In A Patriot Press: National Politics and the London Press in the 1740s (1993) and sev-eral related articles on the press and politics, Harris stresses the ‘mongrel nature’ of political alliances. Political manoeuvrings at mid-century were based on ‘complex alliances between Jacobites, Whigs, Patriots and Tories’ that inevitably blurred the ideological boundaries between these groups. In such an environ-ment ‘people of apparently very diff erent political persuasion came together, forming temporary alliances under the umbrella of the slippery language of pat-riotism and liberty’.19 My research suggests that Haywood is best understood in relation to this discursive Patriot mix. She can be shown to have had relations at diff erent times with dissident Whigs, disaff ected Tories, crypto-Jacobites and all-but-declared Jacobites and she was well known, it appears, to the organized opposition that had formed at Leicester House in the late 1740s and early 1750s. She herself wrote from a variety of political positions. In the months preceding the fall of Walpole and for several years aft er, she operated a pamphlet shop at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden that advertised a line of anti-ministerial wares. During the Fame years she ran a small-scale publishing business and saw into print works exhibiting a strongly oppositional bent. She seems to have been a supporter of the Broad-Bottom opposition of 1742–4. In early 1745 when many former members of the opposition found their way into the new coalition government, her Female Spectator received a telling endorse-ment from Jeff rey Broadbottom, spokesman of the outspokenly anti-ministerial paper Old England, or, Th e Constitutional Journal. She attacked the Duke of Cumberland at least once and may have been a paid propagandist for the party of his brother, the Prince of Wales. Th ere is reason to suspect that Epistles for the Ladies (1748–50), a work with many seeming Jacobite elements, was part of a coordinated eff ort organized on behalf of Leicester House by the oppositional journalist James Ralph under the direction of George Bubb Dodington. Some-times she exhibits a kind of populist Tory-Jacobite radicalism associated with the City.20 Some passages of Th e Female Spectator sound very like the arguments of a Whig radical. To the extent that she is ‘Tory’, as many have argued, she seems

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to possess that eighteenth-century ‘Tory mind’ that J. G. A. Pocock character-izes as displaying ‘a strange blend of Jacobite and republican ideas’.21 Her work from perhaps the mid-1740s onwards expresses considerable sympathy for Jaco-bites and possibly for the Stuart cause, as others have argued, but her sympathies crossed partisan lines in ways that align her less with Jacobitism per se than with the Bolingbrokean ideal of a Patriot King capable of dissolving all distinctions of party and uniting the people around a monarch-father who would rule the country as if it were a patriarchal family. It is no great exaggeration to say that much of her work from Eovaai onwards, and perhaps earlier, meditates upon the implications for women of Bolingbroke’s ideas about public service.

My assertion earlier that Haywood did not write in a party political way in the 1720s is not meant to imply indiff erence to the themes of power, domina-tion, and control that are at their core political. Her amatory fi ctions from this decade share to the full the fascination shown by Bolingbroke in Th e Craft sman with the intoxicating nature of power. He wrote in Th e Craft sman, 13 June 1730, that the ‘Love of Power is natural; it is insatiable; almost constantly whetted, and never cloyed by Possession’. From this premise he argued for the necessity of a mixed and balanced government to hold in check man’s innate desire to exercise power. Haywood shared his views on balanced government, for many of the same reasons, but she was also deeply interested in the power dynamics of men – and women – in private life where, as the plots of the early amatory fi ctions repeatedly demonstrate, the sexual power of men over women is cloyed by possession. More than any other writer of her time she explores the eff ects of power-seeking on the powerless (and it should be noted that women in her analysis could be num-bered among the power-hungry as well, as witness the aptly named Tigernipple in Eovaai.) In seduction-driven plots featuring the heterosexual pair, she lays bare abuses of power on one side (the chronically inconstant male) and thoughtless credulity and susceptibility to fantasy on the other (the too-credulous female).

In romances, satires and political journalism from the mid-1730s onwards she uses the codes and conventions developed for the analysis of gendered power rela-tions to take on an expanded range of social and political questions. From various angles she explores threats to what emerge in the long view as her core values – chief among them constancy, social justice and reason or the sceptical intelligence. It is as if what had begun as concentrated attention on gendered power dynamics is refocused to encompass the entire social order. Within this enlarged fi eld of interest it is no longer the overly susceptible heroine who is under threat but rather the entire social order, a heroine writ large one might say, and it is an order which has come unmoored from its traditional values and is at chronic risk of seduc-tion by the increasingly systemic corruptions of greed, passion and self-interest. Her amatory fi ctions had asked, what must credulous young women do to resist the allure of heteroromantic fantasy? How can they develop the intellectual and

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emotional resources to resist male predation? What is the role of constancy in male-female relations? Of fantasy? Of reason? Her work from Eovaai onwards poses these same questions but transposes them, as it were, into a national and public register. What is the role of constancy in a modern economic order based increasingly on individualism and self-interest? What can be done to educate a too easily infatuated populace to resist the lies, enchantments, and misrepresen-tations of government power? How can human ‘parrots’ be convinced to think with their brains rather than their mouths? Her preoccupations are of a piece, from beginning to end of her career, and party political labels like Whig, Tory and Jacobite recede in importance when Haywood is contemplated within the feminist-infl ected Enlightenment contexts that are reconstructed in some detail in this book. Haywood is rightly admired for her penetrating if somewhat cyni-cal analyses of the skills needed by women to survive in a world that favours men in virtually every way. It is satisfying to discover that in addition she worked out for herself a vision of women’s productive role in national public life more richly imagined than I could have predicted before beginning this study.

One of the shadowy professional relationships of which we catch intermittent glimpses in this biography is with James Ralph, the historian, political journal-ist and oppositional propagandist who was considered by his contemporaries to be a leading political writer. He co-edited Th e Champion with Fielding, wrote behind the pseudonym Jeff rey Broadbottom for Old England Journal and was later editor of Th e Remembrancer, the chief propaganda organ for the Leices-ter House opposition. Th ese are all papers with which Haywood was in some fashion associated. Ralph was also one of the earliest professional writers to give serious thought to the phenomenon of the ‘author by profession’, a category that was beginning to take visible shape over the course of Haywood’s career. Two years aft er her death he published Th e Case of Authors by Profession (1758), a trea-tise that has been described as ‘the earliest comprehensive defense of the class’.22 Ralph divides professional authorship into ‘three Provinces’ or categories: an author may write for the booksellers, for the stage, or – the most interesting for our purposes here – for a political party, in his words, ‘a Faction in the Name of the Community’.23

Th at Haywood wrote for the booksellers and the stage is well known, but the likelihood that she also wrote for a political faction (or factions) represents a whole new way of thinking about her. Ralph described political writing as a demanding application of one’s writing talents, for it requires the author ‘do that without Doors’ – that is, outside Parliament – which ‘his Confederates in a superior Station, fi nd impractible to do within … ’24 Th ere is no smoking gun to establish that Haywood, like Ralph, wrote ‘without Doors’ on behalf of her parliamentary superiors, but a great deal of circumstantial evidence points in

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that direction, and her periodicals from the 1740s – Th e Female Spectator, Th e Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies – take on important new layers of meaning in the context of this possibility. With a few exceptions from a scattering of Haywood scholars, these periodicals have not been approached in a sustained way as ‘political’ works, that is, there has been little attempt to connect them to press activity or the specifi cities of ‘high’ politics at the parliamentary or ministerial level. Th ey have been overlooked by historians of the political press generally and the Leicester House opposition more specifi cally. Th is neglect is not entirely surprising given Haywood’s reputation as an amatory novelist and the tendency of the ‘for-the-ladies’ titles to conceal political intent, but it will be seen that these works have signifi cant points of contact with the wider press debate and their contents give reason to suspect that Haywood had ties with persons within or close to the parliamentary opposition. Th is prelimi-nary investigation of her contributions to polemical activity and press debate at mid-century will I hope act as a stimulus to further historical study.

Th e political life that follows begins with her earliest appearance on stage at the Smock Alley Th eatre in Dublin in 1714 and takes her through to her fi nal major political work, the four-volume Invisible Spy published late in 1754. Five of the chapters provide close readings of key political texts within a variety of political, polemical and discursive contexts. Th ese texts are Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to Utopia (1724–5), Adventures of Eovaai (1736), Th e Female Spectator (1744–6), Th e Parrot (1746), Epistles to the Ladies (1748–50) and, in an epilogue, Invisible Spy (1754). Another chapter examines the 1749 pam-phlet that got Haywood arrested, a Letter to H— G—g, Esq. (1749), as well as several other Jacobite-leaning works, including Th e Fortunate Foundlings (1744). Extensive close readings of imaginative texts may seem an odd modus operandi for a political biography but, in the case of an author whose political views are ill-understood and political engagements oft en misrecognized if not overlooked entirely, it seems a necessary method of proceeding. One benefi t is the revelation, at least it came as such to me, that Haywood is an accomplished satirist who used established political symbol and metaphor to idiosyncratic but powerful eff ect.

Many themes will emerge as the narrative develops, but two require some explanation here. Th e emphasis upon friendships and alliances mentioned ear-lier is part of a larger eff ort to off set the distortions induced by reliance on satire as a biographical source, but there are other historiographical issues to be consid-ered. Th e fact that this eighteenth-century political biography is the biography of a woman poses a number of gender-related considerations or, to put it another way, the narrative shaped for this volume is inevitably an argument about how best to tell the story of a woman’s life. Th e models governing feminist literary

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12 A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

history oft en stress the individual woman writer in her quirky, oft en rebellious singularity or emphasize her identity within female communities or in rela-tion to feminine literary counter-traditions. Th e feminocentric focus tends to restrict the range of questions we are prepared to ask about eighteenth-century women writers with the result, in this instance, that we know much less than we should about circles through which Haywood moved and the professional and political networks of which she was a part. Current interpretive models are oft en ill-equipped to deal with issues of social embeddedness and can be the equivalent of ham-fi sted when it comes to thinking about women’s rela-tionships with men within male-dominated cultural formations, such as the press at mid-century. But to understand Haywood as a political writer we sim-ply must fi nd ways to see her in relation to her male colleagues in the political press, even if the attempt to do so may feel at times like so much untheorized peering into the dark.

Th e role of Jacobitism in Haywood’s writings is presently much debated and since my position is likely to dissatisfy some readers I want to say from the outset that, despite what looks to be considerable fellow-feeling for the Jacobites and their families, I believe Haywood’s support for the Stuart cause has been overstated. David Oakleaf cautions that ‘oppositional political sym-pathies are ambiguous’ and reminds students of Haywood that we must ask of her as we do of Pope or Johnson, ‘What was the nature and extent of her Jacobite sympathy?’ – and, most importantly, we ‘should expect complex answers’.25 One part of that complex answer is that Haywood used idealized Jacobite counterworlds to imaginatively enshrine values (loyalty, hospitality, constancy, steadfastness, sacrifi ce) threatened under conditions of modernity as persuasively described by J. G. A. Pocock in Th e Machiavellian Moment. Closely related to this imaginative Jacobitism is an ongoing preoccupation with issues of social justice linked in Haywood’s texts with a succession of ‘Astrea’ fi gures. Astrea is important in Jacobite mythology as the goddess of justice who returns to earth to review its wickedness and in Haywood’s usage, especially in Epistles for the Ladies, she embodies the idea of a Machiavellian ritorno to justice, patriotism, and public virtue under the infl uence of ‘the ladies’. For Haywood Jacobitism is not so much a political cause as a vehicle of critique and an imaginative resource for her Patriot feminism.

Th e fi rst chapter, ‘Her Approach to Fame’, focuses on the unfolding of her pub-lic life and political commitments as Haywood becomes by degrees an ‘author by profession’ who pursues fame in a variety of forms. Th is chapter off ers an appraisal of her politics in the 1720s that challenges the usual understanding of Haywood as a Tory and anti-Walpole writer, traces her transition from aspiring actress to London coterie poet to innovative novelist to multifaceted market-

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Introduction 13

place professional, and revisits her fraught relationships with the Hillarians, including Savage, Martha Sansom and of course Aaron Hill. Chapter 2 looks closely at her major political work from the 1720s, Memoirs of a Certain Island Adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, arguing that this fascinating and understud-ied roman à clef is a satire on England in the age of the fi nancial revolution that (among other things) responds to two national fi nancial crises, the well-known bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, which forms the allegorical frame-work of Part 1, and the Macclesfi eld scandal that rocked the country in 1725 even as she was composing Part 2, which is one of many stories used to illustrate national corruptions in the aft ermath of the Bubble. Th e moral indignation, sensationalism, and ‘ripped from the headlines’ contemporaneity of this scandal chronicle is read as part of Haywood’s ‘tabloidizing’ imagination.

Chapters 3 and 4 take up the Haywood story in the 1730s which means reassessing her life in the theatre. ‘Th e Th eatrical Th irties’ reconsiders her return to the stage in 1729 in light of the boom in London theatre follow-ing the unprecedented success of Th e Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and reconstructs her relationships with two of her theatrical colleagues at the Haymarket in the 1730s, William Hatchett and Henry Fielding. Her relationship with Field-ing, to take the better known of the two, was far from being the antagonistic ‘war’ that some have imagined, while her relations with Hatchett, who is oft en described these days as her lover and domestic partner, turns out to be more puzzling than existing accounts would suggest. Th e idea that Haywood was his ‘mistress’, as is oft en said, strikes me as unlikely, indeed preposterous, but I hasten to add that the evidence is ambiguous and I will do my best to lay it out fairly. Th is chapter also looks at the roles Haywood is known to have per-formed on stage, something that oddly enough is seldom attempted, and fi nds that she was a deliciously outrageous fi gure on stage, romping and raunchy. Th is chapter is followed by a close and multiply contextualized reading of Th e Adventures of Eovaai, which argues that this Oriental satire-romance represents Haywood’s fi rst outing as a Patriot feminist writer.

Chapter 5, ‘At the Sign of Fame, 1741-1744’, presents new information about Haywood’s publishing venture at the Sign of Fame in the Great Piazza of Covent Garden, an upmarket glass-fronted pamphlet shop where she sold oppositional wares, some published over her own imprint, and off ers a ‘thick’ description of the neighbourhood where Haywood lived for over three years. It uses visual evi-dence to speculate about the sign suspended above the door which (I believe) featured the iconic fi gure of Fama or Fame blowing a trumpet announcing the triumph of Patriot virtue over ministerial corruption. Th is sign, which I argue is reproduced in miniature in the frontispiece to the present volume, is one of the many authorial self-representations that Haywood held out before her public and off ers another example of her immersion in Patriot oppositional culture.

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14 A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 take up her major journalistic texts from the second half of the 1740s, Th e Female Spectator, Th e Parrot, and Epistles for the Ladies, works oft en linked in advertisements and on title pages. Th ese chapters use a combina-tion of close reading and contextual analysis to place Haywood in relation to parliamentary politics. It will be seen that each work has links with arguments and commentary in the oppositional press and that Th e Female Spectator, despite its address to the ladies and its multiple professions of gentility, shows signs of radical populism. It was followed by Th e Parrot, a weekly paper of Jacobite ten-dency which was shut down aft er only nine numbers and suggests the risky path Haywood trod at this time. One of its numbers contains a bitterly satiric portrait of the Duke of Cumberland as a mangler of fl ies. Close readings of the politi-cal subtexts of Epistles for the Ladies deepen the picture of Haywood’s political connections. Th ere are links with the propaganda eff orts connected with such oppositional fi gures as Dodington and Ralph at Leicester House and ultimately, perhaps, the Prince of Wales himself, and there are suggestions as well of connec-tions with the world of City radical Whig opposition via one of her collaborators on Epistles for the Ladies, Richard Glover, and with the Tory-Jacobite opposition through the Welsh MP Sir Watkin Williams Wynn. Her political journalism raises questions not easily answered about Haywood’s motivations and the issue of political backing. Was Haywood working for her bookseller or for sponsors? Was she a hired gun or did she write out of personal conviction – or both? Did she undertake to write these papers on her own or did she function basically as an editor seeking contributions? Chapter 9, ‘Was Haywood a Jacobite?’ contex-tualizes the Jacobitism so evident in many of the writings of the late 1740s in relation to the demoralization of the opposition and the dual-dynastied cult of a Patriot King that fl ourished at the end of the decade. Th e volume concludes with an Epilogue that focuses on Haywood’s self-inscriptions in her last and most self-refl exive political text, the seldom discussed Invisible Spy, written aft er the death of Frederick. She appears in this instance to write as an outraged Tory in the furore over the Jew Bill in 1753-4 and continues her needling campaign against Henry Fielding.

Like many ambitious projects this one began in high-spirited confi dence. Although it seems laughable now, once long ago I envisioned this volume as a defi nitive reappraisal of Haywood’s political writings and career. Questions would remain certainly, but the searching assessment of the politics many have called for would be accomplished and the groundwork for the much-needed comprehensive and reliable life-and-works would be in place. If I am being fully honest, I saw myself as the scourge of ill-founded speculation who would set many misunderstandings aright and, in the words of the Female Spectator, I looked forward to razing the ‘massive Buildings erected by Enchantment’.

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Introduction 15

Th e experience of writing A Political Biography of Eliza Haywood has been chastening, not least because I have been obliged to engage in a fair amount of speculation and guesswork myself, especially in areas where others more trained than I in both the broad sweep and the particulars of political history will detect arguments ‘erected by Enchantment’ requiring correction. And, of course, much remains to be done. Some will notice the omission of discussion of Th e Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania (1726) and others will regret that much attention has been given to a few key texts when a broader survey of her political thought might have been in order. Her work in relation to the Freemasons, the Jew Bill, the Elizabeth Canning episode; the political impli-cations of her many translations; the specifi cities of her political engagements in the 1720s outside Memoirs of a Certain Island – these are only a few topics all but passed over in this study. If there is one thing of which I am certain as a result of preparing this biography it is that, despite a number of very smart studies of individual texts, the study of Haywood’s career as a whole is still in its early days and many more studies like this one will be required before we can confi dently take the long view of her life, texts, career and politics.