The Covent Garden Ladies Read Free Page B

ambitions. Unfortunately, upon his arrival in the capital he found that doors were shut to him, that men who had at one time guaranteed him their favour could only shrug their shoulders and wish him the best of luck elsewhere. With the birth of Jack in the mid-1720s, the young family found their resources rapidly expiring. In order to keep the wolf from the door, his father had no choice but to turn to his pen for support. Fuelled by his sense of anger and betrayal at those who had lured him to London on false hopes, Harris senior lashed out in a series of invectives and ‘failed not to abuse those who had so abused him’. As a Whig by birth, Harris’s father also began to rethink his political affiliations. If his traditional associates among the aristocracy would not have him, he would cross the floor and wound them as a member of the opposition. Shunned by his own society, Harris senior ‘soon made himself very remarkable among the anti-ministerial writers of those days; and the Country Party enlisted him under their banner’.
    In spite of stringent libel laws, Harris’s father flaunted the dangers inherent in being so vicious an antagonist of the parliamentary leader, Sir Robert Walpole. Once he had whetted his sharp pen, he found it difficult to put down, especially as his hostile epistles were at last bringing in money and winning him the support of several wealthy backers. It seemed that the situation had begun to brighten for the Harrises, who were now contemplating an appropriate education for their eldest son. Then quite unexpectedly, when his father ‘was upon the point of sending me to Westminster School’, events took a turn for the worse; Harris senior was arrested.
    Harris’s father had made the fatal error of attaching himself to Nathaniel Mist, a notorious thorn in the side of the establishment. Mist’s Weekly Journal , a scurrilous publication renowned for spoutingunabashed Jacobitism, rolled off a secret printing press until the authorities sniffed it out and smashed it to bits in 1728. Despite stints in prison and in the stocks, Mist and his numerous colleagues continued to publish their libel, this time in the form of Fog’s Weekly Journal . A series of raids soon put an end to this enterprise as well. Among the handful of anti-ministerial writers rooted out during the course of these arrests was Harris’s father.
    Once again, Harris senior, this time locked away in the local compter, looked to his friends and political associates to assist him in his time of need, but no one ever came. ‘He was there for some weeks in want of bail, all his party deserting him, as soon as they had notice of his misfortune’, Jack recounted. His father soon sank into an irretrievable depression. Matters were only to grow worse. The authorities looked upon Harris senior’s crime with gravity and, as such, he was transferred to the King’s Bench Prison where ‘he was sentenced to be imprisoned for three years’. Additionally, he was ‘fined the penalty of five hundred pounds’, a crippling amount for a family in the Harrises’ position. It was during this time, in the mid-1730s, that Jack made regular visits to his father, ‘although his keeper pretended that he had strict orders to let nobody see him’. In later years, Jack admitted that observing his father in such a despondent and weathered state profoundly affected him. Harris senior had been broken:
His misfortunes had so sowered his natural temper that he had become a perfect misanthrope. The ill treatment he had received from both parties had given him an utter detestation of all; and he seemed now to languish at his confinement, only because he had not an opportunity of imposing upon the world, as much as they had imposed upon him.
    Betrayed, exhausted and ill, Harris’s father bid him to learn from the mistakes he had made and not to waste himself in pursuit of an honest life. In a final paternal gesture, Harris senior reached for his pen and