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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
Unseasonable heat and humidity on the evening of April 7, 1779, did not stop Londoners' usual pursuit of business and pleasure. Over in Whitehall, the first lord of the admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, discussed with his harried colleagues the prosecution of the American war. A key strategist in bringing the 13 colonies to heel, Sandwich was a tall, rather clumsy man in his 60s known as a libertine, a passionate fan of the sport of cricket and a great patron of music, especially the work of George Frideric Handel. He was also a hardworking and ruthless politician. The snack that bears Sandwich's name, which was first made by slipping a slice of salted beef between two pieces of bread, was invented not, as legend would have it, to allow the earl longer hours at the gaming table but more time at the office. On this particular evening Sandwich's late-night labors--he had originally planned to go to the theater--were prompted by a pressing threat to his political career. The war in America was going badly, George III's administration was in disarray, and it looked as if Sandwich might be sacrificed to appease government critics.
Across town at the Covent Garden Theatre, where Sandwich had hoped to spend a more amusing evening, ladies and gentlemen, merchants and lawyers were pouring through the lobby for a benefit performance of the popular comic opera Love in a Village. These two events, seemingly unconnected and so different in character, were to be brought together by a terrible crime of passion perpetrated that night.
Among the evening's theatergoers was Martha Ray, Sandwich's 35-year-old mistress. Ray, the daughter of a corset maker, had been a milliner's apprentice before falling in with the earl. At this point, she had been Sandwich's mistress for more than 16 years, the mother of five of his six children, and his public consort. A contemporary described her as "not what we would call elegant, but which would pass under the denomination of pretty; her height was about five feet five inches; she was fresh-coloured, and had a perpetual smile on her countenance, which rendered her agreeable to every beholder." One admirer described her as "a second Cleopatra--a Woman of thousands, and capable of producing those effects on the Heart which the Poets talk so much of and which we are apt to think Chimerical."...
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