Elizabeth Armistead - Early Life

Early Life

The woman known to the world as Elizabeth Armistead was born Elizabeth Bridget Cane on July 11, 1750. Later items in The Public Advertiser and Town and Country Magazine reported her place of birth as Greenwich, UK and her parentage as variously a market porter and an herb-vendor or a shoemaker turned Methodist lay preacher, but biographer I.M. Davis gives such accounts little credence. Samuel Rogers believed Mrs. Armistead had once been a waiting woman to actress Fanny Abington.

"Mrs. Armistead" began her career in an exclusive, high-class brothel in London, though which one is uncertain. A notation from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s appointment books for 1771 include a margin notation, “Mrs. Armitstead at Mrs. Mitchell’s, Upper John Street, Soho Square.” Together with Charlotte Hayes and Jane Goadby, Elizabeth Mitchell was one of the most infamous brothel-keepers of the time. It was quite likely at one such establishment that Mrs. Armistead encountered her first documented patron Frederick St John, 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke.

Many years later, George Wyndham, 3rd Earl of Egremont recalled how he and a group of young friends, including Charles James Fox, had taken a visiting French nobleman to a bawdy-house. On learning that their friend Bolingbroke was being entertained by one of the girls, Egremont, Fox and the others kicked the door open. The girl was Elizabeth Armistead.