Wells, Mary

1762

1829

Mary Wells was characterized by one of her contemporaries as ‘a noted and infamous woman.’ Her three-volume autobiography, “The Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Sumbel, late Wells” (1811), is cavalier about facts and is imaginative with anecdotes; it was written, according to one early reviewer, by a person whose mind was not ‘always perfectly collected.’ She was born Mary Davies in December 1762, one of the daughters of Thomas Davies, a woodcarver and gilder in Birmingham, who – according to Mary’s “Memoirs” – was employed by Garrick to dig up the root of the celebrated mulberry tree at Stratford and fashion a box from it. After some early experience in Birmingham, York and elsewhere in the provinces, in November 1778 at Shrewsbury – at the age of sixteen – Mary married the actor Ezra Wells, to whose Romeo she had acted Juliet at Gloucester. Shortly after, he deserted her. Eventually Mary Wells made her way to the London stage, where on 4 September 1781 at the Haymarket Theatre she was the original Cowslip in O’Keeffe and Arnold’s “The Agreeable Surprise”. The nickname Cowslip stuck with her many years, and sometimes she was called by the nickname Becky. In the 1780s she acted a spectrum of roles, musical, comic and tragic, at the Haymarket, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Among her many roles were Ann Lovely (G0837) in “A Bold Stroke for a Wife”, Imogene in “Cymbeline”, Mrs Page in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, the title role in “Jane Shore”, Audrey in “As You Like it”, Lady Easy in “The Careless Husband” and Lady Randolph in “Douglas”. On 11 May 1786 she appeared for her benefit at Covent Garden in Edward Topham’s farce “Small Talk or, The Westminster Boy”. Because it was an old and established rule among the youth of Westminster School not to permit any exhibition on the stage reflecting their body, a large group of Westminster boys mustered and dispersed throughout the boxes. When in the second act Mrs Wells appeared in the dress of a Westminster scholar, they made such an uproar that the piece was prevented from being heard. By the late 1780s, Mrs Wells had developed a reputation for unconventional and sometimes eccentric behaviour, some of it caused by an incipient insanity exacerbated by drink. She caused a sensation at Weymouth in 1789, when she failed in her attempts to attract the attention of their Majesties on the esplanade, and, in order to follow the King and Queen to Plymouth, she paid ten guineas a week for hire of a yacht, ‘a gun mounted on the deck, on which she sat astride, singing God save the King.’ After affairs with some of London’s leading figures, including Frederic Reynolds, Horne Took, the elder Colman and Sheridan, she lived with the sometime-playwright Edward Topham, by whom she had four children. After five years he left her destitute and miserable. Much of her distress was caused by her indiscretion in backing the considerable debt of her brother-in-law, Emanuel Samuel, husband of her sister Anna Davies, an actress who had made her debut at the Haymarket in July 1786. Mrs Wells bailed Samuel out of the Fleet Prison, arranged an appointment for him in the West Indies and financed his voyage. Plagued by her creditors, Mrs Wells passed several years in prison or trying to avoid prison. It was in 1796 while in the Fleet Prison for debt she met the shady character Joseph Haim Sumbel, a Moorish Jew and former secretary to the Ambassador from Morocco. Sumbel had been confined to the Fleet for contempt of court, having refused to answer interrogatories concerning a large quantity of diamonds found in his possession. In October 1798 in the Fleet, Mary Wells married Sumbel in a wedding of ‘Eastern grandeur,’ solemnized, as one reporter put it, with all ‘Jewish magnificence.’ In preparation, she had converted to Judaism, taking the ritual bath in the Mikvah, and adopting the name Leah. The “Morning Post” commented that ‘Mrs Wells was always an odd genius, and her becoming a Jewess greatly satisfies her passio