Richard Holmes - Dr Johnson and Mr Savage

Throughout, Lady Macclesfield protested her innocence, concealed the affair with Rivers and took immense precautions to cover up the illegitimate births. Later evidence shows that the boy was born in private rooms at Fox Court, Holborn, with both parents using pseudonyms, and Lady Macclesfield even wearing a mask throughout her labour in order to disguise her identity from the midwife.’ 15

The birth of the son was registered at St Andrew’s, Holborn, on 16th January 1697, with Earl Rivers signing himself as godfather, under the name of Captain John Smith. The child was christened Richard Smith. Lord Macclesfield was never able to establish these facts, and the name of Earl Rivers was never mentioned in the House of Lords. None the less a divorce was granted in March 1698, and Lady Macclesfield’s personal fortune was returned to her as part of the settlement. She subsequently married Colonel Henry Brett, in 1700, and bore him a legitimate daughter to whom she was greatly attached. Through Brett’s contacts in Drury Lane (he was a director of the Theatre Committee), she moved for a time in literary circles, and made a friend of the dramatist Colley Cibber. But on the Colonel’s sudden death in 1724, she largely retired from social life, devoted herself to her daughter, and died a recluse at the age of eighty. 16

She always insisted to Brett (who of course knew all the details of the divorce) that both her illegitimate children had died as babies and there is considerable documentary evidence for this claim (see Appendix). She had a reputation as an attractive, kind, and perhaps foolish woman; and as a notably loving mother (as even Savage was forced to admit on occasions). Nothing we know of her from external evidence supports the picture drawn by Johnson.

The one real mystery about her behaviour (as Boswell pointed out after extensive investigation) is why she never sued for libel, either on the publication of the ‘Newgate’ booklet in 1727 or of Johnson’s own Life in 1744. But one can imagine that after the scandalous House of Lords divorce case in 1698, she had had enough of litigation. It even seems possible that she may have felt sorry for Savage, at least in the early years, regarding him as a talented but deluded young man rather than a criminal impostor. But again, by identifying so completely with Savage’s claims, Johnson excludes this interpretation.

Whatever the truth of the affair, the salient feature of this part of the biography is that Johnson did not attempt to unearth it through research. Boswell, although he thought that ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’ as to the final facts, saw this very clearly. 17 It is one of the reasons he so distrusted Savage’s influence over Johnson’s mind and heart, and regarded the whole friendship as an aberration. For him, Johnson’s powers of judgement were temporarily seduced by Savage. Yet one may feel, equally, that for the first time Johnson had found a story that enabled him to give full literary expression to his passionate nature, his intense human sympathies, and his rage against social injustice.

Limiting himself to the ‘Newgate’ materials, and committed to his romantic, and indeed melodramatic version of Savage’s early life, Johnson narrates it as a fable of the Outcast Poet, persecuted and spurned by a malign mother, brought up in poverty and obscurity, and finding temporary succour from a series of generous but frequently disreputable benefactors. Whatever picturesque details he can add, he takes on trust from Savage’s personal reminiscences (though the versions frequently changed).

This is the account that Johnson gives. Born in January 1698 (not 1697 as the registration shows), inexplicably rejected by his mother, Savage was brought up somewhere in London by an anonymous nurse and a godmother called Mrs Lloyd who died when he was aged ten. (Savage later said, ‘As for … the mean nurse, she is quite a fictitious character’. 18

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