Reviving Skittles: Life of a Victorian Courtesan

Click here to read Part 1 of Reviving Skittles: Life of a Victorian Courtesan, my 10-part Bad Girl biography of Catherine Walters, a.k.a. Skittles, the most popular, remembered and notorious courtesan of Victorian England. For the other nine parts, click on the links located on the right-hand side of this blog.

Illustration by Shaina Ortiz

Reviving Skittles, Part 10: The End and a Beginning

 Contrary to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's poetically gloomy thoughts, Catherine Walters wasn’t soulless. She was just unwilling to let her heart be broken again. After the first few days of their affair, Skittles returned to her familiar round of social and intimate engagements, and when Blunt visited, she would casually brush him aside, telling him she was busy and would have to see when she could fit him on her calendar.

Illustration by Shaina Ortiz

In truth, Skittles now found it easier to enjoy a simple romance than to fall into an emotional abyss, which she had done with Lord Hartington. If anyone was to suffer, better it should be a poet. When with Hartington, Skittles had done the hard work of imagining herself a duchess, moving into Hartington’s world, adapting herself to its expectations, and perfecting the role of dutiful and loving wife.

          Now, where could love with Blunt lead? To serial postings in foreign cities over which Skittles would have no say? To endurance of his exhausting emotion, his gloomy moods and romantic wanderings? She preferred staying in the world she knew, with skilled older lovers like Achille Fould, who enjoyed her for herself and made few demands.

          It was just as well that Skittles let Blunt down gently. Her fool’s talk and superficial social whirl would have driven him mad. Jealous by nature, could he have coped with the attention she received from the many former lovers who still adored her?

         Still, his three days with Skittles were enough to ruin Blunt for life—no other woman could ever compare to her, his first love. This, of course, was convenient for Blunt because he would always struggle to reconcile his religious upbringing with the passionate lust he knew he could feel. The search for pleasure was its own punishment, and allowed the wounded orphan boy to avoid intimacy throughout his life.

        The sex stopped, yet Skittles and Blunt began a friendship that was to last for the rest of their lives. It was built on genuine affection and a shared history that continued to grow between them. She could and did tell him anything, as was her way, and Blunt also felt he could reveal himself to Skittles because she didn’t shock easily.

Throughout 1864, Blunt made occasional visits to Skittles’ house in Paris. She was as mercurial as ever, and his melancholy personality showed signs of becoming more entrenched. Now with his sexual initiation behind him but his good looks very much at the fore, Blunt had engaged in a series of affairs and was developing a reputation for promiscuity. In 1865, Blunt’s chief at the Foreign Office posted him to Lisbon, and the former lovers bid each other a platonic farewell.

Blunt eventually married Lady Anne Isabella King-Noel, the only known descendant of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Knowing the history of Byron surely appealed to Blunt as he courted Lady Anne, who like her good-hearted grandmother became embroiled in a troubled marriage to a womanizing poet.

After initially meeting in Venice, Blunt and Lady Anne wed in 1869 and he retired from the diplomatic service in 1872. When their marriage was in the early, happy days they had a daughter, Lady Judith Wentworth, born in 1873.

Like Skittles, Lady Anne was a delicate little woman with searching eyes, and Catholic. But where Skittles might have been “soulless,” as Blunt says in his poem, Lady Anne was all soul. She had converted to Catholicism as an adult, and had a convert’s zeal. Animal lust repelled her; she sought a life of the spirit and quiet meditation. This was exactly what Blunt wanted in a wife. And yet, something about the sensible Lady Anne’s companionship left Blunt cold. She would never toy with him, never “pursue her whim just where it led her, tender, sad, or gay.”

In this sense, Skittles would never be replaced. Not that she would have wanted to be Blunt’s wife, or even continue a long-term affair with him—she was happy he had found a suitable woman to marry.

Years later, Blunt's rebellious and passionate nature brought him back to his relationship with Skittles, but in poetry only. He sympathized with the Irish independence movement, and at one midnight meeting he advocated a home rule plan that got him arrested for charges of resisting the police and sedition under Chief Secretary of Ireland Arthur James Balfour’s Coercion Act of 1887. He spent a two-month sentence in Galway Gaol writing poetry.

           In an 1889 review of Blunt’s work, Oscar Wilde thanked Balfour, saying: “It must be admitted that by sending Mr. Blunt to gaol, [Balfour] has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet. The narrow confines of a prison cell seem to suit the ‘sonnet’s scant plot of ground,’ and an unjust imprisonment for a noble cause strengthens as well as deepens the nature.” Several years later, the now mature poet published “Esther, A Young Man’s Tragedy,” a work that had obviously been in the making for years.

           As for Skittles, during Blunt’s time of tumult, her life grew steadier. When the poet left Paris in 1865, Catherine Walters quickly put their passion behind her, ignored letters from her former lover Hartington, and immersed herself in life with her undemanding older lover, Achille Fould. At the age of 26, Skittles saw that her charms as a courtesan wouldn’t last forever. With Fould’s help, she put her finances in order and found satisfaction in pursuits other than men. He died in 1867 at age 67, and she missed him terribly. Paris wasn’t the same with him gone, and Skittles traveled extensively.

           She was now welcome most everywhere she went, especially back home in England. The notoriety she had gained in the yellowback biographies that purported to tell her life story made her very popular with the British public, which cheered for the socially rebellious girl who had made a name for herself.

            Skittles also appeared in novels such as Ouida’s Under Two Flags, published in 1867, where a character called Zu Zu is a pretty courtesan who rides and hunts. A well-dressed girl with “a vulgar little soul,” Zu Zu does silly things such as throw expensive peaches into the river in hopes of hitting dragonflies, and she thinks it’s “the height of wit to stifle you with cayenne slid into your vanilla ice.”

         The 1860s gave way to the 1870s, and the most suffocating aspects of Victorian oppression also began to give way. With so many women now finding work in the cities with the industrialization of society, their public appearance was no longer shocking.
          At the same time they began pressing for the right to vote, they were making names for themselves in society, on magazine covers and on stage. This fresh perspective put Skittles at the forefront of London life. “Skittles, thanks to the continued friendship of the Prince of Wales, blazed as brightly as ever in the London ‘hemisphere,’” writes biographer Donald MacAndrew. “She had become a sort of institution, or public monument, half-canonized by respectability.”

            As the century turned and World War I came and went, Catherine Walters’ life stayed remarkably consistent—perhaps because she wasn’t a great intellect and had no desire to challenge herself, and perhaps because her early years had been turbulent enough that she sought peace at all costs. A lifelong horsewoman, she maintained her erect carriage and trim figure as she aged, even though she suffered from sometimes crippling arthritis. For years and years she lived at the same South Street address in Mayfair and is believed to have continued receiving Hartington’s £2,000 annual income up to the very end.

          Wilfrid Blunt remained one of Catherine Walters’ closest friends, and their affection for each other became truer and more tender as the years passed. She saw that his poet’s passion for her had run deeply, much as she had mocked it, and he saw that she was far from being the soulless angel of his fantasies. They wrote to each other, and sometimes in good weather, she would visit him on his family estate, where he would greet her wearing an Arab burnous and show her the horses he had bred from the Syrian desert studs.

            “Though deaf and partially blind, Skittles is still unconquered in talk, and gave us all the gossip of the hour though it is too piecemeal for reproduction,” Blunt wrote in his diary after one such visit. The last time they saw each other was at Newbuildings in the spring of 1918, when they talked about the war’s end and he gave her a basket of farm butter and eggs to supplement her London rations. Two years later, Skittles suffered a stroke while sunning herself in a bath chair at home on South Street and died two days later.

Calling herself a “spinster” in her will, Catherine Walters stated: “I declare myself to be as I was born a member of the Roman Catholic Church and I desire and direct that I may be buried according to the rites of the said Church in the burial ground of the Franciscan Monastery at Crawley in the County of Sussex as has been arranged for me with the Superior of the Monastery.”

Gerald saw to it that her burial request was honored, and Wilfrid Blunt, whose brother had founded the monastery, arranged it. 

Blunt died just two years after Skittles, and like his first love received Catholic extreme unction, but was buried like a Muslim at his request.

Reviving Skittles, Part 6: An Unsuitable Attachment

Catherine Walters may have been Victorian London's most sought-after courtesan, but the greatest love of her life was a man out of reach. It was a question of class: Spencer Compton Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, later the 8th Duke of Devonshire, believed from the start that a public life with Skittles would have been social suicide for him, and he never changed his opinion about that, no matter how much he loved her.

I couldn't find any hard evidence of how Skittles and Lord Hartington met, but my guess is that because they were both horse lovers, they probably met at a hunt or on Rotten Row one day when Skittles was out riding. And I can further conjecture that Skittles was openly flirtatious with Hartington, which felt deliciously unfamiliar to him, and that he fell for her quickly because she was a beautiful and fun girl, unlike any woman from the aristocratic and repressed circle who shared his privileged background. Skittles’ open coquetry combined with a mysterious sense of hidden secrets, creating a seductive tension that was hard to resist, and Hartington didn’t.

In turn, Skittles liked Harty Tarty, as his friends called him, because he was so different from the dockworkers and sailors she knew from her early Liverpool days. He was a shy and shuffling bachelor politician of 26 when they met, very sweet in private, and his fear of other people's opinions might have seemed of little importance at the start, and certainly not a fatal flaw.

In addition to being a lumbering and well-read Englishman, very much of his time and place, Lord Hartington was a man who hid his more delicate sensibilities beneath a gravely impenetrable exterior. His portrait shows him to have a long face with a narrow and sensuous nose, thoughtful eyes that droop at the corners, and a surprisingly lush lower lip peaking out from his full Victorian beard. Educated at Holker Hall, the family’s lonely house in the northern county of Cumbria, and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, he entered Parliament in 1857 and was destined to hold a variety of posts including Lord of the Admiralty and chief secretary for Ireland before becoming leader of the Liberal opposition in 1875.

In short, Hartington was a cultured man with an impressive pedigree, and Skittles fell in love with him. And he, in his own way, fell in love with her. She got under his skin, making him excited and confused whenever he saw her. He might resolve to be cool and controlled before one of their trysts, but then there she would be, smiling up at him, and he looking down into her bright upturned face and feeling a sudden surge of passion.

Queen Victoria believed that Hartington's calm nature had a stabilizing influence on her fast-living son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, but more familiarly known as Bertie. What the queen didn’t know was that Hartington, like many Victorian men expected to display a virtuous purity they could hardly bear, had his down-and-dirty side, and it was Harty Tarty himself who first took Bertie round to Skittles’ Mayfair salon in the 1860s, when she was generally accepted as the queen of her profession. She numbered quite a few royals and several princes among her lovers, including the crown prince of Germany, a Russian prince who gave her a miniature phaeton and a matching pair of Viennese chestnut ponies, and so of course she welcomed the 20-year-old Prince of Wales, who became a frequent visitor to her Sunday afternoon parties of baccarat, an illegal yet popular card game. Skittles played her part well--she was a professional, after all, and knew just how to act the perfect sex kitten--and there was something in Hartington's animal nature that made him proud to share his girlfriend with Bertie.

Hartington was Skittles’ first big affair when she was young, however, and despite her party girl ways, she had vague hopes that it would end in marriage. Those hopes rose when her lover took her to balls, parties and the Derby Day horse races. He also provided for her, paying for her house off Grosvenor Square. Surely, her tender affection and gaiety would bring him around, and she knew he felt protective of her. He worried about the life she led, about the emotional risks she took on by being with so many men.

But Hartington's affair with Skittles was only one small part of his life. They rarely spoke of politics, for example, a subject he much preferred to talk about with his other mistress, Lottie, the Duchess of Manchester, who was very much interested in Hartington’s political career even though she was married to someone else. Her marital status did not trouble Hartington, as his previous romantic relationship had been with another married woman, the Countess of Waldegrave.

Indeed, according to historian Patrick Jackson, who winnowed through some 200 letters from Hartington to Skittles, while Skittles spent most of her time in London, Hartington traveled often. “His annual itinerary was the traditional one of his class: London in the spring season, living at Devonshire House in Piccadilly; shooting on the Bolton Abbey estates in Yorkshire in August and September; and during the rest of the year extended visits to the family houses at Chatsworth, Hardwick, Holker Hall in what is now Cumbria, where Hartington had spent a secluded childhood, and Lismore in Ireland,” Jackson writes.

With two women in his life, Hartington felt no qualms about Skittles’ other relationships, though she revealed them to him in detail. If anyone was jealous, it was Skittles. In one letter, Hartington wrote, “There are a lot of people here but I don’t look at any of them because Skits says I mustn’t.” If anything, Hartington encouraged Skittles to pursue other men. In another letter, he wrote, “It is very nice of you to say you are so fond of me but you know there is somebody you like better. Have you seen him lately?”

She was his “darling little Skitsy” or “poor little darling child,” and he spoke to her like she was his baby girl--“Cav loves oo and nobody else”--and he was her big daddy. As she worked with a governess to improve her English, he praised her efforts with this: “I am sure you will learn very quick if you take pains, for you are a clever little child when you like.”

Not only was Skittles his baby girl, she was also a prostitute by trade, and beneath Hartington's social class. True, he found her hard to resist, and they stayed together for years. But he would never marry her.

Instead, he offered her a down payment of £2,500 for a house and an allowance of £400 a year. In late 1861, he wrote, “Sometimes I think that it would be better for you if you could forget me because you are too good to be left in the world all alone so much, and some day you ought to find someone who will take care of you for the rest of your life…which I am afraid I shall never be able to do.”

Coming soon: In Part 7, Skittles gets angry at Huntington for dumping her and chases him down, with disastrous consequences.

Reviving Skittles, Part 5: Rotten Row

Sorry about Part 4. It was really dirty. I'm going to try to regain my dignity here in Part 5 by illustrating it with black-and-white period images and by saying that I discovered Skittles while doing research for my Bad Girls Project at the British Library in London. There's nothing quite like spending days and days and weeks and weeks wandering around a grand library in search of the lost secrets of history.

I'm currently reading The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's bestselling history of the World Columbian about the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, where he combines the biographies of the fair's main architect and a local doctor who became a notorious serial killer. In his notes section, Larson says that he didn't conduct any primary research using the Internet. "I need physical contact with my sources," he writes, "and there's only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness."

With my discovery of Skittles, my match in the darkness was the glimpse I got in the library's Rare Book Room of what life in Victorian London must have really been like. The era's suffocating stuffiness was matched by the amoral decadence that all that repression inevitably created. When Skittles arrived in London in the late 1850s, its population numbered about 2 million people, approximately 100,000 of whom were prostitutes. The Industrial Revolution was well underway, and poor rural folk were crowding into city slums to work for the factory owners so despised by Dickens and Marx. Other thinkers, Darwin especially, were producing ideas that challenged the era’s stern religious values. Men were expected to be all-wise providers, and women to meekly obey their husbands. Etiquette was an elaborate art form unto itself, and doing one’s duty to God and family was an act of patriotism. In short, Victorian London was a place of terrible social rigidity, and people found ways to resist. Women sought the right to vote and other escapes from their over-furnished houses, while upstanding men prowled the nightly haunts of the demi-monde. All these factors produced an ideal climate where courtesans could flourish.

Oops. I've just started to bore myself as a storyteller. That stuff about factory owners and Darwin may be true, but it sounds like blah, blah, blah to me. I've spent my entire professional life as a journalist and editor seeking a distanced objectivity from my subject. I'm tired of it. Now I want to rip everything up and start from scratch. I want to talk about my personal relationship with Skittles. I want to say how I feel about her.

How did Skittles become a shining prize to Victorian gentlemen? She was very nice to look at, of course, but once a man started looking, she started talking with an engaging combination of street wit, little stories, sudden fancies and gossip about people they both knew. I can feel myself falling in love with her. She was light and fun, and all those words tumbling from the sweet mouth of a stylish girl made a man feel deliciously free. Oh, how I wish I could have met Skittles and heard her speak.

I admire Skittles for her passionate desire to get ahead in life. She was never vulgar in the early days of her London career, yet her bad manners and unschooled speech were apparent, and she knew it. But she was a great student of people and a quick learner, and within a few years she had smoothed over the roughest parts of her personality.

So there she is in the late 1850s, just starting out as a courtesan, and spending her nights at the Haymarket, the gaslight-illuminated center of London’s bawdier night life, with its French restaurants, oyster bars, Turkish dens and night spots like the Picadilly Saloon. Kate Hamilton’s, a subterranean club of plush and gilt, brings together high-end prostitutes and low-diving gentlemen in a swirl of noisy laughter and the hunt for pleasure. I imagine Skittles was right in the middle of it, enjoying herself.

She meets the owner of a livery stable near Berkeley Square, a man looking for a pretty prostitute to advertise his wares by driving his pony traps around town. Already, Skittles has kept up her riding skills with races at the Cremorne Gardens. Now, driving the liveryman’s hacks and open phaetons, she makes a name for herself among the high society people who ride in Hyde Park’s Rotten Row and Ladies’ Mile, at Ascot, and at Queen Victoria’s staghound meets.


Skittles became a popular London figure. Her photo appeared in shop windows, women copied the styles she created, and letters to newspapers commented on her public appearances. In July of 1862, a cheeky letter from a young man calling himself "H." appeared in The Times. It was a sly complaint about a Hyde Park roadway choked with fashionable carriages filled with snobs vying for a glimpse of a girl he calls "Anonyma." Clearly, Anonyma is Skittles.

"Last year," H. writes, "she avoided crowds, and affected unfrequented roads, where she could more freely exhibit her ponies’ marvelous action, and talk to her male acquaintances with becoming privacy. But as the fame of her beauty and her equipage spread, this privacy became impossible to her. The fashionable world eagerly migrated in search of her from the Ladies Mile to Kensington Road. The highest ladies in the land enlisted themselves as her disciples. Driving became the rage. If she wore a pork pie hat, they wore pork pie hats;
if her paletot was made by Poole, their paletots were made by Poole. If she reverted to more feminine attire, they reverted to it also. Where she drove, they followed; and I must confess none of them sit, dress, drive, or look as well as she does; nor can any of them procure for money such ponies as Anonyma contrives to get—-for love."

In Part 6, a very feeling part, we'll learn about the biggest love of Skittles' life and why he broke her heart.