The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke

take the Grand Tour and £500 a year rather than go to a public school that was, as she put it, ‘a school of vice’. Theodosius would have entered Eton as a senior, where he would have expanded upon what Rugby had already taught him: a basic classical education accompanied by harsh discipline.
    Eton exercised the law of survival of the fittest. It was physically demanding, not least in its punishments, and flogging by both masters and seniors was routine. The school was well known for its beatings. In the sixteenth century, Friday had been set aside as ‘flogging day;’ from 1809 to 1834 the headmaster, John Keate, used the birch unmercifully – on one occasion he is supposed to have publicly flogged eighty boys. In addition to this, the oldestself-electing society at Eton, ‘Pop’, administered private canings, known to be the severest punishment at the school.
    At all boys’ public schools at the time young boys were expected to ‘fag’ for the older ones in a form of humiliating domestic slavery. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge complained that at his school, Christ’s Hospital, ‘the boys tormented me’ ; another pupil reported that he was woken regularly by a senior boy stubbing out his cigar on his face. Gambling, drunkenness and violence were commonplace, but occasionally the boorish behaviour overstepped even Eton’s boundaries: the militia were called in more than once to keep order. The historian Edward Gibbon commented sourly, ‘the mimic scene of a rebellion displayed in their true colours the ministers and patriots of the rising generation.’ 9 These were boys from privileged backgrounds who, to keep up appearances and status, created mayhem, running up bills that their parents were expected to pay at the end of each term. Theodosius, however, was kept short of money; in the
Defence
Donellan noted that ‘Lady Boughton allowed her son 18 pence a week when first there and half a crown thereafter … an allowance not suitable to his birth and fortune,’ adding that, as a result, Theodosius borrowed money locally, thereby increasing his debts.
    But Theodosius’s debts were the least of his problems. He ‘sank into debauchery’ 10 and contracted venereal disease in his first year at Eton. In July 1777, the newly married Donellans visited him at school, and, according to an article in the
Northampton Mercury
of 23 April 1781, found him lodging at the house of one Mrs Roberts where he was ‘in a deep salivation from the Venereal Disease whilst under the care of a Mr Pearson, Surgeon’. ‘Salivation’ – by which mercury was given in sufficient quantities to produce sweating and large quantities of saliva – was the standard treatment for the disease at the time.
    A horrific case of the effects of mercury was reported in the
Hull Packet
newspaper of 1 November 1803. A child of three, Thomas Clayton, had been given Ching’s Patent Worm Lozenges containing a white panacea of mercury, despite the travelling salesman who had sold them to his parents insisting that ‘not one particle ofmercury’ was in them. The poor child went into a state of high salivation – drooling, flushed and spotted complexion, convulsions – and died in ‘indescribable torments’.
    Self-medication was common enough at the time and the newspapers were full of patent remedies, the sale of which was unregulated by a government which none the less levied a duty on every bottle sold. Nor did medical care improve with any noticeable rapidity in Warwickshire in the late eighteenth century. A document now in Warwick Records Office records one doctor’s prescriptions to the Ward-Boughton family in 1790: ‘a halfpenny-worth of black treacle applied to each side of the head until the rag drops off’ for violent headaches and ‘a fresh ivy leaf applied with fasting spittle each morning’ for corns on