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“Men's vows are womens' traitors.”

“False as the wind, the water, or the weather;
Cruel as tigers o'er their trembling prey.”

“—Though those that are betray'd,
Do feel the treason sharply; yet the traitor
Stands in worse case of woe.”

“Make me acquainted with your cause of grief.”

“To be entangled with those mouth-made vows,
That break themselves in swearing.”

“By all the vows that ever men have broke.
In number more than ever women spoke.”

All we have to do with the story of George Frederick
Cooke, is to account for his connection with the fate of Mrs.
Johnson.

Cooke was the son of an Irish serjeant of dragoons, and of
a Scotch lady. He was born on the 17th of April, 1756.

The serjeant died soon, and the lady was received again by
the friends she had abandoned, (for the drum or the bugle;) at
least, so far as to be enabled to live above want, and give her
only child, George Frederick, a good English education, in the
town of Berwick upon Tweed.

He had been married to a Miss Daniels, and divorced from
her legally, and was at the height of his celebrity, when it was
the ill fate of a Miss Lamb to be thrown into his society. He,
in common with General Williams, and Richard the Third, had

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a wheedling tongue: and the young lady was flattered by the
attentions of the man whom the people “delighted to honour.”
She was told that his habits had long been of the worst kind,
“but, “as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature, in love, mortal
in folly.” She considered all these tales as “weak inventions
of the enemy;” and, like many other young ladies, preferred
her own inclinations to the advice of her friends.

Miss Lamb, as the London Witlings of 1808, said, “was basted
by the Cooke,” she, like many young people of both sexes, formed
erroneous ideas of the stage, and those who tread it. She
had seen and admired Cooke at Covent Garden, before she met
him in private company. She had witnessed the enthusiastic
admiration of others. To be the admired of the admired, turned
the head of the young and artless girl. In vain she was forewarned:
his fame, and his bewitching manners, when sober;
(as he could continue long to be, for any subordinate purpose,
though not to preserve health, reputation, and well-being), surmounted
all opposition; the lady became Mrs. Cooke.

But long before this sacrifice of the Lamb, say in the year
1790 or '91, for nobody ever knew the exact date, a similar
sacrifice had been made at the same altar. Indeed, we have
reason to believe that George Frederick was as little scrupulous
in forming matrimonial engagements, as he was in entering
into theatrical ones, and broke them as easily. This early
engagement was with the lady who we know as Mrs. Johnson.
Cooke was then the hero of Manchester, Liverpool, Bath, and
Bristol; and even then was noted for long continued, and oft
repeated seasons of intemperance. However, the lady thought
love would cure all faults, and she married him. Of this marriage
I can find no record; certain it is, he married twice in
England, and once in America afterward.

With some little outbreakings, now and then, we may suppose
that months passed almost happily. George was fond of
reading, and really loved his wife—for a time. It was impossible
that any creature, possessing human feelings, could do
otherwise. Attractive in personal appearance, though no
beauty—with all the good habits rendered permanent by a tender
domestic education—with love and admiration of her husband,
approaching to idolatry—in short, with every qualification
to render a retired matrimonial life happy—how could a
man, endowed, by nature, with good sense and good feeling, fail
to love such a being?

But habit—that devil, or that angel, as it is good or evil—
the habit, which, in this unhappy man, had weakened the best

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feelings of our nature, and proved the worst of devils, resumed
that sway, which, the desire to gain a fine young girl, and the
novelty of a happy marriage, had interrupted. The bottle, and
the riot, and the madness of intoxication, increased by the
waning of love, and perfected by former associations, prevailed
over every consideration which ought to guide a rational
creature.

The sufferings of the wife were beyond the power of pen to
portray. Long she pined in solitude, for she only saw her
husband when he required a nurse or a servant. No reproach,
by word or look, escaped her. Her tears were unseen; her
smiles and tenderness unappreciated. She became a mother,
and saw that her child had no father. From bad to worse—
from insensibility to brutality—down—down, sunk the victim
of vice; and lower and lower in misery, the victim's victim.

The friends of the lady interfered; but the pride of the conscious
criminal was roused, and defiance to them, and reproach
to his wife, was the consequence.

Let us draw a veil over the scenes which could induce such
a woman as Mrs. Johnson to adopt the resolution of flying,
with her child, from their native country, to seek a refuge from
the husband and the father. To mitigate her own sufferings,
might have proved a sufficient motive for assuming another
name, and crossing the seas; but she had another: to remove
her boy from such a parent, and hide from him the knowledge
of a being, whose example might cause ruin, and whose conduct
must cause shame.

She was assisted by sympathising friends; and the measures
taken for her flight were so judiciously planned, and carefully
executed, that she was placed in safety, with the means of present
support, on the shores of the new world.

Cooke never knew where she had gone, or how she had
been enabled to accomplish a retreat which left no traces behind.
The event awakened him to remorse. His pride, too,
was hurt. But every voice that cried shame! was drowned by
the voice of intemperance. In time, the wife and child appeared
to be forgotten, as though they had never been. But although
he married again and again, they visited his dreams; and in
those moments when images of the past come unbidden; the
moments of feverish and unquiet sleep; moments appropriated
to themselves by the intemperate; in those moments when the
present is shrouded in clouds and darkness, then would a flash
from awakening conscience illumine the figures of his wife and
child. She, holding the boy up, as if to invite the father's hand,

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and suddenly snatching the infant away when within his grasp.
Sometimes in bodily torture, his own groans would sound as
those of his dying wife; and he would see her and her boy
sinking amidst waves. But to the world he appeared as if
he had never had wife or child; and of his early marriage the
world never knew. Much-dreaded solitude could not be
avoided. Then came the pangs of wakeful conscience, or the
visions of troubled sleep, with physical suffering and mental
anguish, intolerable.

Such was George Frederick Cooke in England, and in the
sick chamber of his long-lost wife in New-York.

The romances with which he amused himself and his hearers,
in hours of incipient ebriation, always turned upon adventures
occurring to himself in America. This makes it probable, that
in the musings upon his wife's flight, he suspected that the
United States was the place of her concealment. American
history was the subject of his reading. He was intimately
acquainted with all the scenes of the American revolutionary
war. He delighted in imagining himself to have been an actor
in them, and so to represent himself to his companions. His
memory and imagination were sufficiently strong to produce
descriptions and narrations that puzzled his hearers, and produced
effects upon them, that flattered the narrator in
those moments when reason and conscience were drugged by
the undermining opiates applied to the senses. It is even possible
that this suspicion, (relative to his wife's place of refuge,)
influenced him, when, in one of his many moments of madness,
he inlisted in a marching regiment, as a common soldier, and
was only prevented being transported to America, by the accidental
discovery of his purpose, at the time, and in the act
of embarkation.

p089-340

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