Chapter 9
THE SOCIAL PRESTIGE OF Leicester House and Richmond Lodge waned considerably after the reconciliation. The Prince and Princess of Wales wisely recognised that it would no longer be appropriate to entertain in such a lavish manner as to outshine the formal ceremonials at St James’s. Besides, they were able to preside over the latter from June 1720 when the King set sail for Hanover once more. However, another, more unexpected, factor was about to hasten the decline not just of the couple’s two main residences, but of London’s social life generally.
The South Sea Company had been established by the Earl of Oxford in 1711 to trade with South America, but also as an alternative source of government funds to the Whig-dominated Bank of England and East India Company. Eight years later, there was a scheme to use it to take over part of the government debt. Even though the company had no trade, this immediately prompted wild speculation, and it seemed that the whole of London was scrambling to buy subscriptions.
Edward Harley wrote in astonishment to his brother, who had founded the scheme: ‘The demon of stock-jobbing . . . fills all hearts, tongues, and thoughts, and nothing is so like Bedlam as the present humour which has seized all parties, Whigs, Tories, Jacobites, Papists . . . No one is satisfied with even exorbitant gains, but everyone thirsts for more, and all this founded upon the machine of paper credit supported only by imagination.’ Many gambled their whole fortunes on what they regarded as a sure prospect. The King himself ventured a considerable sum, and Henrietta also wagered some of her modest funds. She was apparently shrewd in her investment, for her friend Elizabeth Molesworth wrote to express ‘the additional pleasure of hearing you have been successfull in the southsea’.1 Fortunes were made overnight, and people who had previously been barred from high society were now welcomed into the most exclusive circles.
By August 1720, the price of stock had risen almost tenfold. The inevitable crash, when it came, wreaked widespread devastation. Thousands were rendered destitute overnight. Those who had enjoyed a brief glimpse of high society were thrown back into their accustomed orders, and many aristocratic families were ruined. ‘There never was such an universal confusion and distraction as at this time,’ wrote one observer, ‘many are ruined by their boundless avarice.’ Alexander Pope, who had wisely resisted advice to buy some stock a few weeks before, told a friend that the crash had come ‘like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of our death’. He had little sympathy for those whose greed had lost them everything. ‘Methinks God has punish’d the avaritious as he often punishes sinners, in their own way, in the very sin itself,’ he wrote. ‘The thirst for gain was their crime, that thirst continued became their punishment and ruin.’2
Dismay and devastation were rapidly followed by anger and revolt. There was a general cry for the King, the Prince and the government to be made accountable. All the anti-German feeling that had been bubbling under the surface for so long now burst forth in a torrent of protests, propaganda and violence. The German ministers and mistresses were a target for the people’s vitriol, and they were accused of having been bribed with large sums to recommend the project. It was even suggested that the entire royal family should resign and go back to Hanover.
Ministers urged the King to return to England at once, and he reluctantly agreed. Furious at having his visit so abruptly curtailed, he arrived back in early November. There followed a fierce debate in the House of Lords, during which Lord Stanhope, the chief minister, was accused of being the cause of all the trouble. He was so enraged by this that he fell into a fit and had to be carried home, where he died the next day. The Secretary of State, who was ill with smallpox, went the same way shortly afterwards, and his father, the Postmaster-General, chose to poison himself rather than face the accusations against him. The Hanoverian regime was deep in crisis.
Out of the debris rose Sir Robert Walpole. Unlike so many of his peers, he had shrewdly sold his South Sea stock at exactly the right moment and had amassed a considerable fortune as a result. This later enabled him to build a lavish new mansion near the Norfolk coast which eclipsed all the aristocratic houses for miles around. Walpole hailed from that county, being the son of a Whig MP, and had soon inherited his father’s passion for politics. Regarded as a ‘violent’ Whig during his undergraduate days at Cambridge, he was first elected to Parliament in 1701, and had risen rapidly through the ranks to become Secretary at War. His fortunes, and those of his fellow Whigs, had declined during the years of Tory supremacy under Queen Anne, but he had been quick to seize the initiative when the Hanoverians had come to the throne.
Walpole’s coarse manners and vulgar speech were notorious. In parliamentary debates, he was simple and direct, while in private his language was as earthy as any squire’s. Swift said of him: ‘he’s loud in his laugh, and he’s coarse in his jest’, while Chesterfield described him as ‘inelegant in his manners’ and ‘loose in his morals’.3 He enjoyed to the full every pleasure that Georgian England had to offer. He drank deeply, hunted hard and kept at least one mistress. He also played up to his rustic origins by munching little red Norfolk apples to sustain him during long parliamentary debates. The English people loved his vulgarity and plain-speaking, and he in turn understood their hopes and fears, which proved to be one of the most powerful advantages he had over his enemies.
Walpole’s directness also appealed to the Princess, who knew that he would always tell her the truth, and who shared his base humour. He cultivated her favour by making sure that he attended court regularly, which he rightly perceived was an essential prerequisite to furthering his career. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu recalled that he was fond of the maxim that ‘whoever expected advancement should appear much in public. He used to say, whoever neglected the world would be neglected by it.’4
With Lord Stanhope dead and the government in crisis, Walpole spied his chance for glory. He ensured that when the ministry was reconstructed, the chief power would reside in his hands. He became, in effect, Prime Minister (Britain’s first), a post that he was to retain for the next twenty years. George I admired him greatly, once telling Caroline that he believed he could ‘convert even stones into gold’, and placed a great deal of trust in him.5 Partly as a result of this, and partly because Walpole had failed to fulfil the promises that he had made at the reconciliation, the Prince disliked him intensely. Disaffected Whigs and Tories therefore flocked in ever greater numbers to Leicester House.
Chief among these was Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. A fierce opponent of Walpole, Bolingbroke had risen to high office in Queen Anne’s reign, first as Secretary of War and later Secretary of State. He had spent several years in exile on the Continent after the Hanoverians came to power, but was now back at court, eager to stir up trouble for the Prime Minister. Bolingbroke was a somewhat volatile character, given to extremes of behaviour. ‘His virtues and vices, his reason and his passions, did not blend themselves by a gradation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden contrast,’ wrote Lord Chesterfield.6 His quickness of temper and boldness of action contrasted with his lively wit, charm and intelligence. It was no doubt the latter characteristics that attracted Henrietta, and he became a regular guest at her evening parties.
Bolingbroke was joined by William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, another opponent of Walpole. He had risen to the position of Secretary at War when George I became king, but had resigned this office during the schism of 1717 and had since failed to return to greatness. United in their opposition to Walpole, he and Bolingbroke set up an influential political journal, The Craftsman, which attacked the corruption that it claimed festered in the seats of power. Like Bolingbroke, Pulteney had ‘lively and shining parts’ and a ‘surprising quickness of wit’. He had a particular talent for amusing ballads and poetry, with which he would entertain Mrs Howard and her companions at court.
Completing the trio was Dr John Arbuthnot, former physician to Queen Anne. He had long moved in Tory circles, and his opposition to Walpole’s regime had found expression in the biting political satires, journals and pamphlets that spilled from his pen. In the society of wits, politicians and courtiers who thronged into the coffee houses of London, he played a central role. But for all that, he was remarkably modest and unassuming, and to his friends he was both generous and loyal. ‘If there were a dozen Arbuthnots in the world I would burn my Travels,’ Swift once declared. Henrietta also valued his friendship highly. They had met some years before when she had first taken up her post in the Princess’s household, and had soon become close friends. Arbuthnot had apartments near hers at St James’s and would attend her whenever she was sick. She had therefore been delighted when he had followed the Prince of Wales to Leicester House after the split of 1717.
Henrietta’s association with Walpole’s enemies was to drive an even deeper wedge between her and the Princess. But at the same time it won her the respect of the Prince, who delighted in anything that might antagonise the King. With members of the Opposition finding a warm welcome at Leicester House, the division in the royal household was almost as marked as it had been before the reconciliation, and life for those who served in it once more became a tale of two courts.
For Henrietta, the trial of serving both the Prince and Princess was starting to take its toll. She began to complain of violent headaches and was sometimes too ill to carry out her duties in Caroline’s household. She also missed her friends Mary Bellenden and Molly Lepel (now Mrs Campbell and Lady Hervey respectively), especially when the court repaired to Richmond for the summer. Without their company, the Lodge was a considerably less diverting place than it had been during the preceding years, and Henrietta’s main source of entertainment was the letters she received from her absent friends. They too longed to be with her: ‘I wich we were all in swiss cantons,’ lamented Mrs Campbell.7
Henrietta confided her increasing dissatisfaction with life at court to Mrs Campbell, but urged her to destroy the letters in case they should be seized by her enemies. Her friend wrote at once to reassure her: ‘You may be sure I’ll never name you for an author upon several accounts, nor indeed talk of any thing you writ for tis what I detest.’ Their mutual friend, Lady Lansdowne, was also admitted to her confidence. ‘I hope Dear Mrs howard you & I shall Live to see better days,’ she wrote, ‘& love & honour to flourish once more.’8
Henrietta’s growing aversion to her life at court was not only caused by the lack of close friends nearby. After four years, the Prince’s passion for her seemed to be cooling. Theirs had never been a great love match, but Henrietta was well aware of how fragile her position would be if he rejected her. The first signs of his restlessness can be traced to early in 1722, when her friends observed her to be ‘much in the vapours’. Rumours soon reached Mrs Campbell. ‘I was told before I Left London, that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & crosse & not so good to you as usual,’ she wrote to her friend. As somebody who had also been the subject of the Prince’s affections, Mary was able to empathise with Henrietta’s predicament, and lamented that his coldness ‘betrays the want of that good understanding, that both you & I so often flatter’d ourselves about, but these times I fear is over’.9
If Henrietta had been growing restless even before this turn of events, she now longed to be free from court. Those of her friends who had already left and found happiness heartily wished that she could do so too. ‘It would make one half mad, to think of mis spent time in us both,’ reflected Mary Bellenden, ‘but I ame happy, & I wou’d to god you were so. I wish . . . that your circumstances were such that you might Leave that Life of hurry, & be able to enjoy those that Love you, & be a little att rest.’
His sense of timing as impeccable as ever, Charles Howard chose this moment to begin tormenting his wife once more. His premise was the royal reconciliation, which he claimed gave Henrietta even less cause to continue living apart from him. During the five years since she had left St James’s, he had continued to enjoy the sordid pleasures that had diverted him during their life together. In so doing, he had plunged himself still further into debt, and therefore renewed his attempts to secure a greater portion of Henrietta’s fortune than their marriage settlement had allowed him. He wrote to taunt his wife with the news that he was again suing her beloved brother ‘for that Sum [£4,000] I have undergone much vexation’, adding: ‘I desire to know if you will oppose it, and am truly sensible of the folly I committed, in makeing you so Independent of me.’10
Howard’s letter had the desired effect, and Henrietta at once admitted: ‘to find you have a resentment against my Brother adds to my uneasinesse’. However, she insisted that she no longer had any power over the matter of her £4,000 inheritance. Fearing that he would use their son to blackmail her, she begged him not to ‘Endavour any thing that may hereafter prove a disadvantage to the child,’ adding that when they had lived as man and wife, ‘I and the child [were] put in the fears of starveing through the whole course of our lives’. Her reply only served to ignite Charles’s wrath, and rumours of her renewed marital strife soon began to spread throughout the court. ‘I want to know if mr howard is come to town, & if he is not plagueing you,’ wrote her friend Mary Bellenden, who had heard the news. Henrietta did what she could to limit the damage, urging her husband to keep a cooler head and arrive at ‘a better opinion of me then your present warmeth will admit of’. Given Charles’s notoriously hot temper, this was a vain plea. For the next few months, he continued to slander his wife ‘in ye most inveterate and publick manner too coarse to be repeated and too great to leave the world unamazed’.11
Assistance came from a rather unexpected quarter. The Prince, tiring of his mistress and impatient with her troublesome husband, offered her a way out of court. He presented her with a gift of stock worth £11,50012, together with ‘a sett of Guilt Plate’, some diamond jewellery, a ruby cross, a gold watch, and all the furniture and furnishings of both her own and her servants’ rooms at Leicester House and Richmond Lodge. He also threw in a shipload of mahogany – a rare and much-prized commodity – which had just arrived in London. For a man notorious for his miserliness, this was an extraordinarily generous gift. That he intended it to buy Henrietta’s independence from her husband was clear in the wording of the settlement, which stipulated that the Prince’s gift was something ‘with which the said Charles Howard shall not have any thing to doe or intermedle’. Instead, she was to ‘use or dispose of the same as she pleases . . . as if she was sole and unmarryed’. Anticipating that she would use the money to buy a house of her own away from court, George made sure that her husband would be unable to touch this either: ‘the premisses soe to be purchased to and ffor the sole proper peculiar and seperate use and Benefitt of the said Henrietta Howard alone and not for the use or benefit of the said Charles Howard her husband’.13
The Prince was right in his prediction about what his mistress would spend the money on. She had for some time longed to escape court for a home of her own. The previous year, she had confided to her friend Mary Campbell that she was ‘Jealous for Liberty and property’.14 Without the Prince’s gift, this had seemed a distant prospect. Now it was suddenly within her grasp. Overjoyed at her unexpected turn of fortune, Henrietta at once set about making plans to build a house where she could escape the misery of her life at court. The need to keep this a secret was paramount. Even though the terms of the settlement made it nigh-on impossible for her husband to get his hands on the property, he had proved more than capable of making a nuisance of himself on numerous occasions in the past, and would no doubt do so again if he found out that his wife was about to gain her independence. The Princess, too, was eager to retain Henrietta at court for fear that her husband would find a mistress who threatened her own hold over him.
Henrietta went in secret to seek the help of an acquaintance, Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke. Known as ‘the Architect Earl’, he had grown up at Wilton, near Salisbury, which was believed to be the work of Inigo Jones, the first great British admirer of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Lord Herbert was a patron of Colen Campbell, the leader of the English Palladian revival, and he engaged his protégé in working up some initial designs for Mrs Howard’s villa. These were conveyed in secret to her apartments at Richmond Lodge that summer. She was delighted with this first glimpse of her future retreat, but resisted the temptation to share her excitement with even her closest friends. One day, when she was called to Greenwich unexpectedly, however, she inadvertently left the plans visible in her apartments. It was fortunate that the person who discovered them was a trusted friend.
John Gay had paid an impromptu visit to Richmond Lodge and, on finding the royal party absent, had repaired to Henrietta’s rooms to wait for her. When she had not returned by the end of that day, he wrote to tell her that he had called, and expressed his curiosity about the plans he had seen. Greatly alarmed, Henrietta wrote to him at once: ‘I beg you will never mention the Plan which you found in my Room. There’s a necessity, yet, to keep that whole affair secret, tho (I think I may tell you) it’s almost intirely finish’d to my satisfaction.’ Gay assured her: ‘When I hear you succeed in your wishes, I succeed in mine, so I will not say a word more of the house.’15
Either Gay failed to keep his word, or Mrs Howard’s excitement triumphed over her usual discretion, because before long her project had become one of the worst-kept secrets at court. But if the Princess knew about it, she was, for now, content to indulge her ‘good Howard’ in her ambitious scheme. She was, in any case, absorbed with housing plans of her own, for the Duchess of Buckingham was making overtures to the royal couple that they should lease her house on the west side of St James’s Park. A natural daughter of James II, the Duchess was proud of her Stuart ancestry and rather disdainful of the Hanoverian royal family. The Princess had expressed an interest in the house at a recent court reception, but rather than deal with her directly, the Duchess chose Henrietta as an intermediary. ‘I have express’d my intentions about the house in a way that several perhaps would not,’ she wrote to her, ‘considering the little care and regularity that is taken in the prince’s family.’ The terms she offered were £3,000 per annum to rent the house, or £60,000 to buy it outright.16 This was unacceptable to the royal couple, and the scheme was dropped. However, Buckingham House was to be purchased by the Crown some forty years later, and in the early nineteenth century it was remodelled by John Nash and became known as Buckingham Palace.
Henrietta’s project, meanwhile, was progressing apace. Having approved the designs, she now sought an appropriate location for her new house. Early in 1724, she instructed her friend the Lord Ilay, who was a trustee of her settlement from the Prince, to purchase some land in an area known as Marble Hill, situated by the Thames at Twickenham.
By the early eighteenth century, the village of Twickenham, lying some ten miles south-west of London, had become one of the most desirable places to live for those wishing to escape the noise and smells of the capital. Just two hours by barge from London, and within easy reach of Hampton Court and Richmond Lodge, it became a magnet for members of fashionable society who sought rural tranquillity combined with ready access to the court. Lord Ilay himself had built a mansion there, the handsome Whitton Place, and he was surrounded by a host of other noble residents. The politician and government official James Johnston, a younger son of Lord Wariston, had modelled the elegant Orléans House on his country seat in Lombardy. The portrait painter Thomas Hudson lived nearby, as did Lord Strafford, the Dowager Countess of Ferrers and Lady Fanny Shirley. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who spent every summer there with her husband at the elegant Savile House, wrote to a friend in 1722: ‘I am at Twickenham where there is at this time more company than in London.’ So rapidly was the village expanding that later the same year, she told her friend that it had ‘become so fashionable, and the neighbourhood so enlarged, that ’tis more like Tunbridge or Bath than a country retreat’.17
But perhaps the most important influence on Mrs Howard’s choice of location was the proximity of her friend Alexander Pope. He had moved to the village in 1719 and had built a new villa on the proceeds from his translation of Homer’s Iliad. Henrietta was captivated by his descriptions of the peace and tranquillity of the place compared to London. ‘At Twickenham the World goes otherwise,’ he wrote. ‘We have as little politicks here within a few miles of court . . . as at Southampton.’18
Delighted at the prospect of a new neighbour, Pope offered to help his friend with the design of her house and, in particular, its grounds. A keen gardener, he soon began to spend so much time at Marble Hill that he neglected his writing. ‘My head is still more upon Mrs Howard and her works than upon my own,’ he confessed to a friend in September 1724. He may well have drawn inspiration from the magnificent grounds of his friends the Digby family at Sherborne in Dorset, where he had stayed that summer. ‘I have spent many hours here in studying for hers, & in drawing new plans for her,’ he told his friend Martha Blount. His subsequent account of the parkland at Marble Hill showed that there was a direct correlation between the two. ‘The Valley is laid level and divided into two regular groves of horse chestnuts, and a bowling green in the middle of about 180 foot. This is bounded behind with a canal [the Thames].’ The elegant layout of Marble Hill’s gardens was to remain unchanged for the next forty or so years. An account of 1760 described the ‘fine green lawn, open to the river . . . adorned on each side, by a beautiful grove of chestnut trees’.19
Before long, Henrietta’s other male acquaintances at court were falling over themselves to help. The Earl of Peterborough seemed even more eager than she was to see it completed. ‘I was impatient to know the issue of the affaire, and what she intended for this autumn,’ he wrote to Pope, ‘for no time is to be Lost either if she intends to build out houses or prepare for planting.’ He promised to call on Pope as soon as possible so that they could go together to Marble Hill.20
An amusing rivalry developed between the men involved in Mrs Howard’s project, as each battled to outdo the others’ efforts. ‘Fair Lady, I dislike my Rivalls amongst the living, more then those amongst the dead,’ wrote a peevish Lord Peterborough, ‘must I yield to Lord Herbert, and Duke Ily, if I had built the castle of Blenheim, and filled the Land with Domes and Towers, I had deserved my fate for I hear I am to be Layed aside as an extravagant person fitt to build nothing but palaces . . . I can even wish well to the house, and garden under all these mortifications, may every Tree prosper planted by what ever hand, may you ever be pleased & happy, whatever happens to your unfortunate Gardiner, & architect degraded, & Turned of.’21
Allen Bathurst, 1st Earl of that name, was another rival for Peterborough to contend with. In common with an increasing number of Henrietta’s friends, he was an ardent Tory, and, having lost the political prestige he had enjoyed under Queen Anne, he was now in constant opposition to Walpole’s regime. Bathurst was renowned for his wit and counted some of the greatest literary figures of the day among his friends, including Congreve, Prior and Swift. He was also a close friend of Pope, who had recently introduced him to Mrs Howard. She was instantly captivated by his humour, and in particular his willingness to poke fun at the court. ‘I am convinced I shall make but an awkward Courtier,’ he told her in one letter, claiming that the last time he had been presented at Richmond, ‘the folks I met there . . . looked upon me as a wild Beast whose teeth and Claws had been lately pulled out’.22
Their friendship became close enough to cause a scandal at court. ‘I, who smell a rat at a considerable distance, do believe in private that Mrs Howard and his lordship have a friendship that borders upon “the tender”,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to her sister. Dismissing everything that Henrietta had pleaded to the contrary, she continued: ‘as there is never smoke without some fire, there is very rarely fire without some smoke. These smothered flames, tho’ admirably covered with whole heaps of politics laid over them, were at length seen, felt, heard, and understood.’23
Before long, news of the suspected affair had reached the Prince. According to Lady Mary, he told his mistress that if she ‘shewed under other colours’, he would withhold her salary. If her account is to be believed, Bathurst was subsequently ordered to stay away from Richmond, and the matter was never spoken of again. There is little other evidence to support this, however, and the Earl was in fact welcomed back to court on many subsequent occasions.
Tender or not, Henrietta’s friendship with Bathurst proved useful in the design of her new house. Like Pope, he was a keen gardener and had a magnificent park of his own near Cirencester. He was eager to assist in the layout of the grounds at Marble Hill, and told Pope that he planned to wait on their mutual friend there as soon as possible. He later sent some lime trees to be planted in her gardens.24
While Henrietta was grateful for her friends’ help with her new villa and its grounds, she was not about to leave such an important project to well-meaning amateurs, and instead enlisted the services of some of the greatest architects and gardeners of the day. For the grounds she engaged Charles Bridgeman, landscape gardener to the King himself. Bridgeman was already much in demand and Pope had recently seen his work for Viscount Cobham at the celebrated gardens of Stowe. He visited Marble Hill with Henrietta and Pope in the summer of 1724, but there followed a delay of some weeks before he gave his opinion. He wrote to the latter in September explaining that he had been very busy, but assuring him that he had ‘begun on the plan, and have not left from that time to this so long as I could see, nor shall [I] leave it till ’tis finished which I hope will be about tomorrow noon’.25
The laying out of the grounds at Marble Hill was to continue for some years. In the meantime, Henrietta commissioned Roger Morris, a little-known but talented architect, to build ‘the naked carcass of a house’. He was paid £200 on account and started work straight away. Henrietta was far from being a passive observer of all this activity. Her interests extended well beyond the ‘tea and scandal’ with which the poet Congreve identified her sex.26 She was passionately interested in, and had a sound knowledge of, the architectural styles that were prevalent in England at that time. As the ‘Honourable Mrs Howard’ she was included in the list of subscribers to the third volume of Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Britannicus in 1725. This included the designs for Marble Hill, although secrecy was still observed, for it was referred to simply as ‘A house in Twittenham’. Henrietta also subscribed to both volumes of William Kent’s The Designs of Inigo Jones in 1727.
Mrs Howard’s friends and family were well aware of her passion for architecture, and often sought her advice on the design of their own homes. Lord Chesterfield wrote to her from his ambassadorial residence in the Hague in 1728 complaining that, having commissioned a spacious new apartment, he was ‘at present over head and ears, in mortar’. Fearing that he might have judged the dimensions incorrectly, he pledged to ‘submit to you and Lord Herbert; who I hope will both be so good as to give me your sentiments upon it’. Many years later, Henrietta’s nephew John appealed to her during his modernisation work at Blickling, which he claimed his wife and sister were ruining with ill-advised schemes of their own. ‘Your authority is necessary to silence them,’ he insisted.27
The influence that Henrietta had on her own house can be clearly traced. Its harmonic architectural proportions owed much to the Palladian style that she so loved. As such, it was at the very forefront of fashionable taste, for this style was only just beginning to take hold in England. Its origins lay in the ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe, which had become an essential component of a gentleman’s education. The Tour followed an established route which took in some of the greatest classical sites on the Continent, such as Rome and Pompeii. This in turn sparked an interest in the designs of the sixteenth century architect Andrea Palladio, whose villas were based on the strict numerical ratios and geometrical symmetry of his Greek and Roman forebears. The overall effect was one of elegant simplicity, and the Georgians loved it.
The period gave rise to some of the greatest Palladian creations of English architectural history: from the remodelling of Stowe and Woburn Abbey to the building of Prior Park in Somerset and Nostell Priory in Yorkshire. Marble Hill was on a much smaller scale, but was still regarded as one of the finest Palladian villas in England. ‘I long to see what I’m told is the prettiest thing of the size that can be seen,’ wrote Henrietta’s friend Lady Hervey.28 It was also one of the earliest, for it was not until after 1730 that the movement really started to take hold.
But Marble Hill was more than just a purely academic exercise; a slavish homage to the designs of Palladio. Not for Mrs Howard the rigid symmetry of Lord Burlington’s house at nearby Chiswick, which was devoid of such luxuries as bedrooms and kitchens, and was variously described by contemporaries as ‘rather curious than convenient’ and ‘too small to live in, but too large to hang on a watch chain’.29 For all its elegance, both inside and out, Marble Hill was a house designed for a lady to live in and receive company, and Henrietta ensured that it was practical as well as aesthetically pleasing.
The house had two main entrances, for guests would arrive either by the road to the north or the river to the south. Most would have chosen the latter, as this was by far the most comfortable way to travel and avoided the dust, discomfort and danger of the bumpy roads, which were also riddled with highwaymen. Pope had fallen foul of them while Marble Hill was being built. On his way home one evening, his coach had been overturned when it crossed a broken bridge. He had been thrown into the river and had been ‘up to the knots of his periwig in water’ before the coachman had broken the windows and dragged him out. Pope’s hand had been so badly cut that it was feared he would lose the use of his little finger ‘& the next to it’.30 A surgeon had been hastily summoned from London, and had confirmed that the hand would be permanently crippled.
The scene of sylvan calm that is presented to modern-day visitors as they gaze across the Thames towards the graceful house beyond is rather different to how it would have looked in the early eighteenth century. The river would have been bustling with traffic: from elegant courtiers flitting between St James’s or Hampton Court and their country retreats, to barges laden with goods pulled by dray horses plodding along the path. A contemporary engraving depicts the view that would have unfolded before them as the river wound westwards away from Richmond. A sweeping wide avenue of chestnut trees led the eye up the gently sloping bank towards the elegant villa – described as being ‘as white as snow’ – that sat in the centre of the view. It was, and remains, a perfect composition, an image of beauty, taste and simplicity. ‘Among all the Villas of this neighbourhood, Lady Suffolk’s, which we sail past, on the left, a little below Twickenham, makes the best appearance from the river,’ claimed a guide written for Georgian river tourists. ‘It stands in a woody recess, with a fine lawn descending to the water, & adorned with wood well-disposed.’31
After strolling through the avenue, guests would arrive in the elegant entrance hall. With its precise symmetrical proportions, including four carefully positioned columns, this imitated the central court of a Roman house. Pope told Henrietta that it was ‘the most delightful room in the world except where you are’.32 An intimate breakfast parlour had been built downstairs, overlooking the river, while a grand staircase, fashioned from the mahogany that the Prince had given her, allowed visitors to parade in style up to the stately Great Room. Favoured guests might ascend the inner stone staircase to retire in one of the three fine bedrooms on the third storey, or to view portraits in the long gallery that ran alongside. Eight garrets were squeezed under the eaves for the servants, who used the same concealed stairs to reach the service wing. On the outside of the house, meanwhile, Henrietta ordered that balconies be added to the south front so that she could admire the fine prospect towards the Thames, Ham House and Richmond Hill.
The clarity of Henrietta’s vision for the house suggests that she had filled many long hours at court planning every aspect of it in her mind, even though the need for secrecy had prevented her from committing these thoughts to paper. She made the most of the times when the court was at nearby Richmond to inspect the work in progress, and was so immersed in this task that she was no longer able to maintain a regular correspondence with her absent friends. ‘How does my good howard doe, me thinks I Long to [hear] from you,’ wrote Mary Campbell in August 1724. ‘I suppose you are up to the ears in bricks & mortar, & talk of freez & cornish Like any Little woman.’ She added that she was about to pay a visit to Colonel Fane’s new Palladian-style house at Mereworth in Kent, ‘where I intend to improve my self in the terms of art, in order to keep pace with you’.33
While she was heavily involved in the design, Henrietta’s duties at court allowed her only the occasional visit to Marble Hill. This was a source of great frustration, for the house was rapidly becoming her sole source of comfort. Instead she had to make do with the news that her friends sent back to her from there. Work certainly seemed to be progressing apace, for within just a few short months, Pope was able to report: ‘Marblehill waits only for its roof – the rest is finished.’34 He must have been referring to the ‘carcass’ only, for there was still a great deal to do on the rest of the house. Nevertheless, the speed at which Morris and his men were working was impressive.
Frustrated by her confinement at court and impatient with her now onerous duties for both the Prince and Princess, Mrs Howard received some welcome relief in the form of a new visitor to Leicester House. Jonathan Swift was Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, but was better known for his literary genius than his spiritual endeavours. A close friend of Pope, Gay and Arbuthnot, he had risen to prominence during the reign of Queen Anne, when he had put his considerable literary talents to good use on behalf of the Tories, and before long he had become their leading propagandist. Despite winning favour with the Queen, he had been unable to secure a position at court, and on her death he had returned to his native Dublin, where he soon afterwards took up his post at St Patrick’s.
Swift was not neglected by his friends back in England, who struck up a regular correspondence with him and continually begged him to return. As an incentive, Pope offered to introduce him to his friend Mrs Howard, whom he was confident Swift would admire as much as he did. ‘I can also help you to a Lady who is as deaf, tho’ not so old as your self,’ he told him. ‘You’ll be pleas’d with one another, I’ll engage, tho’ you don’t hear one another: you’ll converse like spirits by intuition.’35 Pope was right. When Swift finally gave in to his entreaties and paid a visit to England in the spring of 1726, he quickly forged a close friendship with Mrs Howard. It was fortunate that they conversed by word rather than intuition, for their good-humoured sparring kept their friends entertained during many a long evening at Leicester House. Their lively exchanges continued by letter after Swift had left England, and read like a duel of wits.
Swift’s most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, was published – anonymously – shortly after his departure. This satirical tale was based upon certain characters within the Georgian court, including the royal family themselves. Henrietta read it with delight, and her next letter to Swift was loaded with references to it. Copying the style of the inhabitants of Lilliput, she wrote diagonally down one side of the paper and up the other. She also wove in various characters and scenes within the book, such as the ‘Brobdignag Dwarf’ and the ‘Academy of Lagado’, and signed the letter ‘Sieve Yahoo’ – the name that Gulliver gives to ladies at court. Swift pretended to be bemused by the missive, claiming that it was ‘the most unaccountable one I ever saw in my life’, and that he had been unable to ‘comprehend three words of it together’. ‘The perverseness of your lines astonished me,’ he continued, and said that he had puzzled over its meaning for four full days before a bookseller had sent him a copy of Gulliver’s Travels. He added that he had rather resented being ‘forced to read a book of seven hundred pages in order to understand a letter of fifty lines’.36
For all their literary sparring, it seemed that Swift and Mrs Howard had a great deal of affection for each other. She gave him a ring as a token of her esteem, which he wore constantly to remind him of his new friend, and in return he presented her with a gift of luxurious Irish plaid ‘made in Imitation of the Indian wherein our Workmen here are grown so expert’. Henrietta was so delighted with this that she proudly showed it off to the Princess, who immediately seized it for her own use.37
Like Henrietta’s other male friends, Swift involved himself in the development of her new house. He was rather less serious in the task than Pope and Peterborough, however, and his chief preoccupation seemed to be with the wine cellar. He styled himself ‘chief butler and Keeper of the Ice House’, and told Henrietta: ‘I hope you will get your house and wine ready, to which Mr Gay and I are to have free access when you are safe at Court.’38 Swift did make a more practical contribution to the house by helping his new friend with the furnishings. He supplied more of the Irish plaid cloth, and this was used for bed hangings and curtains in the bedroom that subsequently become known as the ‘Plaid Room’.
Much as she yearned to join her friends at Marble Hill, Henrietta was delighted by their obvious enjoyment of her new house, which was detailed in the many accounts that they sent her. Their lively party was broken up in August, when Swift returned to Ireland. His departure was greatly lamented. ‘Tis a sensation like that of a limb lopp’d off,’ Pope told him. ‘One is trying every minute unawares to use it, and finds it is not.’39 Henrietta was now among the circle of Swift’s English friends who wrote to him regularly, and sometimes they composed joint missives for his entertainment. One of the most amusing was a recipe for ‘Stewing Veal’, which was laden with nonsensical puns. Its inspiration was the fact that Swift had complimented Pope’s cook on the veal stew that she had served during a supper party at Twickenham. His friends used the recipe as a metaphor for the ingredients they thought should go into his sermons. It was written in Gay’s hand, but there were contributions from Pope, Bolingbroke, Pulteney and Henrietta. They urged him to cut these up ‘in a few pieces’ in order to make them more palatable for the congregation.
Swift thanked them for it, but said he wished ‘the measure of Ingredients may prove better than of the Verses’, and added that he would like a recipe for ‘a Chicken in a wooden Bowl from Mrs Howard, upon which you may likewise exercise your Poetry, for the Ladys here object against both’.40 Not wishing to be outdone on the rhyming stakes, he ended with a short verse lamenting the recent misfortunes that had befallen his friends in England:
Here four of you got mischances to plague you
Friend Congreve a Feaver, Friend Howard an Ague
Friend Pope overturned by driving too fast away
And Robin at Sea had like to be cast away.
Swift may have numbered Henrietta among the friends whom he missed now that he was back in Dublin, but his interest in her was not entirely selfless. Tired of being so far away from the centre of political life, he hankered after a place at court. Despite assuring his new friend that he was ‘no Courtier, nor have anything to ask’, he clearly saw her as one of the best means to advancement.41 He expressed his delight that the Princess had shown him such favour when he had been at Leicester House, although he claimed that he had not sought it: ‘For I am not such a prostitute flatterer as Gulliver, whose chief study is to extenuate the vices and magnify the virtues of mankind.’ He begged Mrs Howard to make sure that her favour would continue now that he was back in Ireland.
Henrietta served Swift well, not just with the Princess (who encouraged their correspondence), but with the court in general. ‘My correspondents have informed me that your Ladyship has done me the honour to answer severall objections that ignorance, malice, and party have made to my Travells,’ he wrote in November 1726, ‘and bin so charitable as to justifie the fidelity and veracity of the Author.’ Grateful for her assistance, he added: ‘This zeal you have shown for Truth calls for my particular thankes, and at the same time encourages me to beg you would continue your goodness to me.’ Realising the importance of retaining Mrs Howard’s favour, Swift showered her with witty and amusing letters to fill her tedious hours at court. He even threw in a bit of romance for good measure, going so far as to suggest marriage – something that he could hardly promise, given his ecclesiastical duties. Henrietta was well aware of his insincerity and gave short shrift to his ridiculous proposal. ‘I had rather you and I were dumb as well as deaf for even then that shou’d happen,’ she admonished him.42 Suitably chastened, Swift resorted to less romantic means to win her favour in future.
Diverting though his letters were, Henrietta had more pressing matters to attend to at court, for her husband Charles was once again making trouble. He had been fighting a protracted and costly legal battle with his brother, Edward, for the past few years. When the 7th Earl of Suffolk died in 1722, he complicated the succession by settling Audley End House and estate on Charles, who was the younger of his two uncles, thereby passing over Edward, who succeeded to the earldom. Edward contested the will, and the two brothers fought it out in the courts, running up huge costs in the process. Eventually, in June 1725, they entered into articles of agreement whereby Charles could retain the house and estate on condition that he paid Edward £1,200 out of the rents and profits. He was also to bear all the legal costs. Although Charles agreed to this, he did not put the necessary arrangements in place to levy the annual payments out of the estate, and two years later his brother was still pressing for them.
Rather than sort out the estate, Charles preferred an option that was both simpler and, for him, more entertaining: to torment his wife until she agreed to give him the money. That Henrietta was using the Prince’s generous gift to build herself a house away from court was no longer a secret. Charles knew how much she valued her independence, and would therefore also have guessed how much the house meant to her. He could not have been presented with a more perfect means of blackmailing her.
‘Mr Howard, having a mind to turn his reputed cuckoldom to the best account, began to give his wife fresh trouble,’ related Lord Hervey, ‘and in order to make her pay for staying abroad pretended an inclination to have her return home.’43 Enlisting the support of George I, who was ever glad of an opportunity to annoy his son, Charles wrote to Princess Caroline in the spring of 1727, telling her that he had ‘again receiv’d his positive directions, that she immediately retires from her Employment under your Royal Highnesse’. He professed his ‘unhappinesse in this difficulty’, claiming that he would not have dared put forward such a request had it not been expressly commanded by the King.44 The Princess showed the letter to Mrs Howard, who immediately sent back a terse response to say he had indicated neither where she should go nor in what manner he would provide for her if she left her mistress’s service.
But Charles was not to be bowed by his wife’s defiance, and assured her that ‘all attempts you can use to the Contrary will be in vain’.45 Besides, he had a few more tactics up his sleeve. One of them was to call upon the highest ecclesiastical power in the land to help fight his case. William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, was not of a mind to be drawn into an affair that had all the makings of a public scandal. He also distrusted the man who had just related the tale of his wife’s disobedience. On the other hand, he strongly disapproved of marital infidelity, particularly when it concerned the heir to the throne. He was also aware that if Mr Howard chose to invoke the law, there was not a court in the land that would support the wife against the husband, regardless of who her lover was. He therefore wrote to the Princess of Wales, urging that her husband’s and the King’s honour were at stake because if Charles pursued his case through the law, it would ‘make a great noise’. Wake concluded that he hoped she would take ‘some method to prevent any such writ being brought to your House by getting the Lady out of it’.46
The Princess did not particularly want to endure a public scandal, but she was determined to keep Henrietta at court in order to maintain the delicate balance of power. She cleverly replied that if Mrs Howard wished to return to her husband then she would willingly release her – a thing that she knew full well was the last thing on earth her Woman of the Bedchamber would ever do.
Henrietta used all her powers of reason in attempting to make Charles drop his case. She reminded him that when she had left their apartments at St James’s following the royal quarrel, he had ‘directly dismissed’ and ‘absolutely discharged’ her, saying that he never wanted to see her again. ‘What refuge more safe, more honourable or more rational can a wife so abandoned by her Husband have recourse than to Continue in the service of the Princesse of Wales,’ she argued. Knowing full well that reason alone would not work with her husband, however, she sought the intervention of the Hobart family solicitor, Dr James Welwood, who went in person to try to persuade him. Unfortunately, this served only to provoke him further. Welwood told Mrs Howard that Charles had appeared ‘highly incensed’ and had fiercely denied the allegation that he had abandoned her. He therefore advised her to remain calm and sit it out until her husband tired of the whole affair.
He had reckoned without the tenacity of Mr Howard, who had his eyes on a much greater prize than his wife’s return and was not about to give up so easily. Believing that if he caused enough embarrassment, either his wife or the Prince would pay him off, he resorted to increasingly dirty tactics, warning Henrietta that her continued disobedience threatened to ruin their son’s reputation, and that the boy had been greatly upset by the whole sorry affair. ‘How ungratefull and shocking A part he must share in life, to hear the reproaches of your Publick defiance to me, and what the World will interpret the occasion of it,’ he surmised, concluding that she should give up her case at once if she cared at all for the ‘small Posterity of A child you seem’d to love’. His words must have wounded Henrietta deeply, but she refused to allow him to use their son as a pawn in his evil game. ‘You mention Sir a tender subject indeed, my Child,’ she replied. ‘I wish to God he was of a riper age to be Judge between us, I can not but flatter my self he would have more Duty and humanity than to desire to see his Mother exposed to misery and want.’ She berated her husband for using the young boy in ‘ye disputes yt have hapned between his father and mother’ in order that he could pursue his ‘precarious expectation of court favours’, and begged him to speak no more of this ‘preposterous reconciliation’.47
But Charles knew that he had hit upon one of the surest means of distressing his wife, and he continued to bait her on the subject. Scorning her ‘feigned’ tenderness towards her son, he told her that the boy would never choose her over his father. ‘No artifice, or Temptation of Reward upon earth, will ever Prevaile with him to desert me, or disobey my Injunctions.’ Henrietta replied that she ‘hardly dare trust my weakness upon that subject’, but insisted that although Henry’s tender age made him ‘susceptible of impression good or bad’ she could not believe that he would ‘persevere in forgetting he has a mother’. What she then went on to say was a testament to the grief that she had suffered over her son – as well as the depth of her hatred for his father. ‘I am not willing to sopose he will long neglect a parent who has not forfeited ye duty he owes her but if this of all other evils is yet reserved for me I must bear it with patience and submit to my fate,’ she wrote. ‘If I were now to dye he might say he had a mother to whom he had not paid the respect yt was due, so on the other side if he deserts me however lamentable the stroke is to me, I must and will think as in cases of mortality that I once had a Son.’48
This statement put paid to any further attempts by Charles to use their son against her. If she was prepared to give him up for good rather than submit to her husband’s demands, then it was futile to pursue this line of argument any longer. Henrietta was playing a dangerous game. The ensuing years would prove that she had far from given up hope of reclaiming her son, but she knew it was vital to convey this impression now in order for Charles to spare him the shame of being involved in their increasingly public battle.
Furious that what he had assumed was a certain route to victory had backfired on him, Charles resorted to the only other means he could think of: violence. He managed to secure a warrant from the Lord Chief Justice which gave him the right to seize his wife ‘wherever he found her’. ‘This step so alarmed Mrs Howard,’ observed Lord Hervey, ‘who feared nothing so much as falling again into his hands’, that she became a virtual prisoner at Leicester House.49 She knew that she was safe from Charles as long as she remained there, for it was surely too extreme a measure – even for him – to attempt to take his wife by force out of the Prince of Wales’s palace.
This confinement could not last for long, however. Summer was fast approaching, and with it the royal household’s traditional removal to Richmond. This presented a very real danger for Henrietta. Etiquette would not allow a mere Woman of the Bedchamber to travel in the Princess’s coach. She would therefore have to follow behind in a much less secure carriage, which it would have been all too easy for Charles to ambush. Neither could the royal party travel in secret: their annual pilgrimage to Richmond attracted thousands of spectators, and the magnificence of their stately procession did not exactly blend in with the surroundings. Henrietta therefore hatched a plan with her friends the Duke of Argyll and Lord Ilay to make her escape to Richmond in one of their coaches. They would leave early in the morning, some four hours before the royal coach. Once there, she would be lodged at Argyll’s house in Petersham, rather than in the residence close to Richmond Lodge that she had recently shared with the Maids of Honour.
The plan worked brilliantly, and Mrs Howard was soon safely installed at the Duke of Argyll’s house. The whole experience had terrified her, however, and even now she did not dare to set foot outside her safe house. ‘I have not been abroad since I left London,’ she wrote to Dr Welwood, apparently having been excused from her duties to Caroline, ‘nor have I Courage yet to venture out.’50 Her terror must have been great indeed, for not even the prospect of seeing her beloved Marble Hill again could incite her to leave Argyll’s house. It was a miserable summer that she spent there, knowing that the manifestation of her independence was taking shape, brick by brick, just a few minutes away down river, and tormented by the thought that she might never be able to enjoy it. Her friends shared some of her frustration. ‘Really it is the most mortifying thing in nature, that we can neither get into the court to live with you, nor you get into the country to live with us,’ Pope wrote to her from nearby Twickenham, ‘so we will take up with what we can get that belongs to you, and make ourselves as happy as we can, in your house.’51
Work at Marble Hill was progressing apace, and it was now so near completion that Henrietta had engaged a housekeeper and established a small farm in the grounds to supply the house with fresh milk, eggs and other dairy produce. While she was confined at Petersham, her friends were able to take full advantage of the daily improvements that were being made to her new home. Pope was a frequent visitor to the house, and tried to keep his friend’s spirits up by supplying her with regular updates on its progress. ‘We cannot omit taking this occasion to congratulate you upon the increase of your family,’ he wrote, ‘for your Cow is this morning very happily delivered of the better sort, I mean a female calf; she is like her mother as she can stare . . . We have given her the name of Caesar’s wife, Calf-urnia; imagining, that as Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, this Roman lady was suckled by a cow, from whence she took that name.’ He went on to say that he and Gay had celebrated this momentous event with a ‘cold dinner’ at the house, which included wine, meat, fish and ‘the lettice of a greak Island, called Cos’. He added: ‘We have some thoughts of dining there to morrow, to celebrate the day after the birth-day, and on friday to celebrate the day after that, where we intend to entertain Dean Swift.’51
Pope’s exuberance was premature. Shortly after he had dispatched this letter, events at court brought work on Mrs Howard’s beloved house to a sudden halt.