Chapter 6
NO SOONER HAD THE royal yacht set sail than George and Caroline were acting the part of King and Queen in all but name. Their court was even livelier than before. They kept open house and lived from morning to night in a perpetual round of gaiety. A little over a week after the King’s departure, they left the cramped confines of St James’s and repaired to Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s magnificent pleasure palace by the Thames. Their very journey was a spectacle to behold as they made a progress up the river in state barges hung with crimson and gold, and headed by a band playing music.
The Prince and Princess passed the whole of that summer at Hampton Court, and everything they did was on a grand scale. As a public relations exercise, it was faultless: by demonstrating what a brilliant court they could hold, they simultaneously drew attention to the sharp contrast with George I’s staidness and reserve. They gathered around them the glitterati of Georgian society: all of its wittiest, most beautiful, wealthiest, cleverest and most talented members were there. Ordinary people, too, flocked to Hampton Court, eager to witness the most extravagant royal entertainments since the decadent days of Charles II.
They were not disappointed. The Prince and Princess appeared in public several times a day. It was one of the finest summers for years, and in the mornings they would take the air on the river in richly decorated golden barges, hung with curtains of crimson silk and wreathed with flowers. One of the visitors noted with some astonishment that ‘all sorts of people have free admission to see them even of the lowest sort and rank’, shrewdly adding: ‘They gain very much upon the people by that means.’1
In the afternoons, the Prince and Princess would walk in the elegant palace gardens for two or three hours, followed by the Maids of Honour and their beaux. The Prince would then play a game of bowls with the gentlemen of the court, while his wife and her ladies sat in the nearby pavilion and chatted, played cards and drank tea until dusk.
The eager crowds were sometimes treated to another glimpse of the royal party in the evening, when they chose to take supper in public. After this, there would be the traditional court pastimes of music, dancing or cards. More often than not, though, they each had private suppers and parties in their apartments, attended by a few select friends. It was often late into the night before everyone finally retired. This pattern was repeated day after day and night after night. It was a bewildering round of entertainments that would have exhausted even the most energetic of courtiers, but the fact that Caroline was at this time heavily pregnant with her fifth child made her stamina all the more impressive.
The gaiety and diversions of court life during that summer at Hampton Court extended to the ladies and gentlemen of the royal household. Chief among them was Henrietta. During her two years in the Princess’s service, she had developed social graces commensurate with the most seasoned courtier. Her lively wit and keen intellect were feted throughout the court, and her discretion, mildness and good nature won her many friends among the Maids of Honour and other members of the court. ‘She has as much Good nature as if she had never seen any Ill nature, and had been bred among Lambs and Turtle-doves, instead of Princes and Court-ladies,’ Pope once said of her, and this view was shared by many others.
On the evenings when her mistress chose to dine privately, Henrietta held supper parties in her own apartments at Hampton Court. These were likely to have been on the eastern range of the new palace built by Wren, overlooking the magnificent ‘Fountain Court’. If so, they were directly above those occupied by the Princess and were linked to her State Bedchamber by means of a small staircase. This meant that Henrietta could swiftly respond to any summons from her mistress that might arrive while she was off duty. The Maids of Honour nicknamed these chambers ‘the Swiss Cantons’, and Mrs Howard ‘the Swiss’, on account of the neutral position she occupied between conflicting interests at court.
Discretion was a rare quality among members of the Georgian court, with its daily round of scandals, and Henrietta’s companions were grateful for it. Flirtations (or ‘frizelations’, as Henrietta called them) were a common feature of the evening parties in the Swiss Cantons. These were lively gatherings, attracting some of the wittiest and most vivacious members of the court. Among them was Philip Dormer Stanhope, later Earl of Chesterfield. An exuberant young man of twenty-two, he had a somewhat unprepossessing appearance. Lord Hervey described him as being ‘as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed . . . He was very short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a polyphemus.’ But Stanhope’s intellect and humour more than made up for his physical deformities. His amusing letters and anthologies were celebrated throughout the court. Dr Johnson described him as a ‘lord among wits’, and even Lord Hervey admitted that he had ‘more conversable entertaining table-wit than any man of his time’, adding: ‘he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion’.2
Among these was Henrietta. She and Stanhope had first met a year earlier, when he had been appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. She delighted in his company, which enlivened the monotony of her duties at court, and he was similarly enchanted by her gentle wit and intelligent conversation. The two soon became close friends, and the bond between them was strengthened by their shared experiences in the household of the Prince and Princess.
Undoubtedly the greatest of the wits and poets to frequent Henrietta’s apartments that summer, though, was Alexander Pope. Like Chesterfield, Pope’s physical stature made him somewhat disadvantaged. He was just four feet six inches in height and had a humped back. His physique was further hampered by a fragile constitution, and he was dogged by ill health throughout his life. Chesterfield referred to his ‘poor, crazy, deformed body’ as a ‘mere Pandora’s Box, containing all the physical ills that ever afflicted humanity’. His face bore noble and intelligent features, however, and the famous eighteenth-century artist Sir Joshua Reynolds found it a fascinating subject: ‘He had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which are always found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which ran across the cheek were so strongly marked that they seemed like small cords.’3
But Pope’s physical defects were eclipsed by the brilliance of his poetry, and by the time Mrs Howard made his acquaintance, he had already become one of the leading lights of the literary world in Georgian England. In 1709 he had published the Pastorals to great acclaim, followed by An Essay on Criticism and the mock epic Rape of the Lock three years later. His most famous work, though, was his translation of Homer’s Iliad, published around 1714, which had achieved such widespread popularity that even George I and his son were among the subscribers. Pope’s literary talent was matched by his skill in conversation, which was littered with irreverent observations and flattery, and he soon became a firm favourite with the Princess’s ladies.
As well as poets, wits and Maids of Honour, Henrietta’s supper parties also included the most illustrious member of the Hampton Court set: the Prince of Wales himself. Attracted more by the charms of the Maids of Honour than by the diverting conversation, George became a frequent visitor to Mrs Howard’s apartments. He found the hostess’s modesty and discretion appealing, and was flattered by her patient interest in his tediously long accounts of the military campaigns in which he had fought. The attention he paid to her led some to speculate that they were already lovers.4 Pope hinted at it in a poem written to the Maids of Honour at around this time:
But should you catch the Prudish itch,
And each become a coward,
Bring sometimes with you Lady R– [Rich]
And sometimes Mistress H–d [Howard]
For Virgins, to keep chaste, must go
Abroad with such as are not so.
It is not clear whether Pope was implying that Mrs Howard and Mrs Rich were not virgins or that they were not chaste. The fact that Lady Rich was well known for her marital infidelity does lead one to suspect that it was the latter. While it was entirely acceptable for a prince of the royal blood to bed ladies at court, it was less so if they were married. In Henrietta’s case, this was complicated by the fact that her husband worked in the King’s service, and Charles Howard’s notoriously volatile nature made it all the more necessary for her to keep such rumours from him. It is therefore unlikely that she would have enjoyed the humour in Pope’s verse. Besides, there is little to suggest that her relationship with the Prince had gone beyond harmless flirtation at this stage.
The summer of 1716 at Hampton court passed in a round of receptions, parties, recitals and other diversions. All the gaiety and flirtation that had been suppressed in the dowdy rooms of St James’s now burst into life. In a letter to Henrietta written a dozen or so years later, Molly Lepel wistfully recalled ‘a thousand agreeable things’ from that time. ‘I really believe a frizelation wou’d be a surer means of restoring my spirits than the exercise and hartshorn I now make use of,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t suppose that name still subsists, but pray let me know if the thing it self does, and if ye meet in the same cheerfull manner to supp as formerly; are ballads or epigrams the consequence of these meetings? is good sence in the morning and wit in the evening the subject or rather the foundation of the conversation?’5
Beneath the frivolity that summer was an undercurrent of political scheming. Hampton Court became a magnet for dissenters from the existing regime, including malcontent Whigs, supporters of the Tory opposition, and even some suspected Jacobites. The Duke of Argyll was among the Tory contingent, despite having been dismissed from his offices at George I’s explicit instruction. Meanwhile, the King’s faithful servant Bothmer was playing spy and sending frequent reports back to his master in Hanover.
The two principal ministers in government, Lord Townshend and Sir Robert Walpole, decided that swift action was required to prevent the royal couple from falling completely under the spell of the Opposition. Walpole went to see for himself what was happening at Hampton Court, and was dismayed to find that Argyll was frequently granted private audiences with the Prince and Princess. He wrote anxiously to Townshend: ‘You can entirely conjecture what must be the consequence of these appearances . . . They have such an effect already, as draws the tories from all parts of the neighbourhood, gives such a disgust to the Whigs as before michaelmas I may venture to prophecy, the company here will be two of the king’s enemies.’6
Townshend went at once to join his fellow minister at the palace. It is proof of the influence that Henrietta now had – or was perceived to have – that he paid his court first to her in the hope that by these means he would ‘insinuate himself mightily in the favour of the Prince’. In so doing, he had underestimated that of Princess Caroline, who was affronted by his neglect. A word from her woman of the Bedchamber, Lady Cowper, urging him ‘how wrong his usage of the Princess was, and how much it was for his interest to get her on their side’, made him quickly change tactics.7 Before long, Townshend had succeeded in winning favour with the royal couple, and a political crisis for the Whigs was averted – for the time being at least.
As summer drew to a close, the royal party bade farewell to Hampton Court and made their way back to St James’s Palace. A few days after their arrival, the Princess went into labour. All the gaiety and harmony that had existed that summer quickly evaporated, and tensions again arose between the Hanoverian and English courtiers. A German midwife had been assigned to oversee the birth, but she claimed that the English ladies of the household had threatened to have her hanged if the baby died. With Caroline becoming increasingly agitated as her pains came in ever stronger waves, the midwife stood by, refusing to touch her unless she and the Prince agreed to defend her against such threats. Upon hearing of this, George flew into such a rage that he vowed to throw the perpetrators out of the window. Lord Townshend eventually managed to restore order by taking hold of the midwife, shaking her and making ‘kind faces’ in order to bring her to her senses. This furore can hardly have been soothing for the Princess, who was suffering a traumatic labour, and after several days she was delivered of a dead prince.
Further trouble was to come, for as Caroline lay recovering in her bedchamber, the King was making his way back from Hanover. He arrived in London at the beginning of December in a foul temper, fuelled by a tiresome journey and fierce resentment at having to take leave of his beloved homeland. There he had been feted and honoured as a ruler should be, in stark contrast to the treatment he had received from his upstart English subjects. Ministers, diplomats, princes and courtiers had all come to pay their respects to him, and there had been assemblies and receptions every night in celebration of his longed-for return. Free from the onerous customs of the English court, the King had been a changed man. ‘His Majesty dines and sups constantly in public,’ one visitor to Hanover reported. ‘The court is very numerous, and its affability and goodness make it one of the most agreeable places in the world.’ His two years in England seemed little more than an unpleasant dream. Lord Peterborough, who was among the guests at Herrenhausen, noted that the King was so happy that he believed he had ‘forgotten the accident which happened to him and his family on the 1st August 1714’.8
But all good things come to an end, and it was with the bitterest regret that George reluctantly departed from Hanover in order to resume his royal duties in England. The frequent reports he had received about his son’s increasing popularity prompted him to do so, and also exacerbated his already sour temper upon his arrival at St James’s. The simmering resentment that had long existed between the King and the Prince of Wales was now on the verge of breaking out into open hostility. Any pretence at civility was abandoned, and they barely acknowledged each other in public.
The political malcontents at court were quick to seize upon this opportunity to further their ambitions, and worked hard to widen the gulf between father and son. Within a few months of the King’s return, the carefree summer at Hampton Court seemed a distant memory, and the court was now beset with tension and suspicion. The King was desperate to escape these troubles by returning to Hanover, but his ministers warned him of the danger of doing so in view of the Prince’s growing influence and popularity. At length they persuaded him to stay in England and launch a summer of such lavish entertainment at Hampton Court that it would eclipse his son’s of the previous year and thereby bolster his own public image. George duly made his way there in July 1717, accompanied by the Prince and Princess.
The King was far from being a lively and genial host, but he cast aside his natural reserve and entered into a full round of social engagements. He progressed to chapel every Sunday in full state, watched by the crowds of people who had travelled back to the palace once more. So many were there, in fact, that one contemporary lamented that London was ‘now very empty since the Royal Family went to Hampton Court, where the public manner in which the King lives, makes it the rendezvous not only of the Ministers and great men but of the people of all ranks and conditions’.9
Despite his hatred of the custom, George I dined in public every Thursday, and held balls, dancing and other elaborate entertainments almost every day. As a deliberate snub, he excluded his son from these occasions, but he seemed to have a genuine affection for his daughter-in-law and invited her along to many of them. Caroline’s physical charms were certainly not lost on him, and he was openly flirtatious, sometimes overstepping the bounds of decency with his lewd remarks. When she rebuffed his advances, he effected frustration and called her ‘cette diablesse Madame la Princesse’, but kept up his attentions to her all the same. This reduced the Prince to paroxysms of rage, and it was clear to everyone at court that a breach of monumental proportions was brewing.
George I had made a valiant attempt to create a vibrant court life at the palace that summer, and for a while it seemed that he would succeed in outshining the Prince’s efforts. But he could not sustain it for long, and by the end of the royal party’s sojourn, he had fallen back into his accustomed ways, shunning society for the company of his mistresses. With characteristic scorn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed: ‘Our gallantry and gaiety have been great sufferers by the rupture of the two courts here: scarce any ball, assembly, basset-table, or any place where 2 or 3 are gathered together. No lone house in Wales, with a rookery, is more contemplative than Hampton Court: I walked there the other day by the moon, and met no creature of any quality but the king, who was giving audience all alone to the birds under the garden wall.’10
In October 1717, the Prince and Princess returned to St James’s Palace, where the Princess, heavily pregnant once more, began her lying-in. She gave birth to a boy, George William, on 2 November, and as this was the first prince of Hanoverian blood to be born on British soil, it was a cause for great celebration. Ministers, officials, courtiers and household staff, including Henrietta, crowded into the Princess’s bedchamber to offer their congratulations. Even the King, who was still at Hampton Court, expressed his satisfaction and sent his compliments to their Royal Highnesses. But far from leading to a reconciliation between them, the new Hanoverian prince was to be the unwitting cause of an open rupture.
Upon his return to St James’s, George I enquired into the ceremonies that were traditionally observed at the baptism of royal princes in England. He was informed that the custom was for the King to act as godfather and choose another from the principal lords at court. His gaze alighted upon the Duke of Newcastle, a mean-spirited and obnoxious nobleman whose eccentricities rendered him a laughing stock in polite society. Both the Prince and Princess despised him, but this only increased his suitability in the King’s eyes, and George duly nominated him as the second godfather. The Prince was incensed at this deliberate provocation and immediately demanded that his father retract the offer. But the King was immovable, and ordered preparations to continue as before.
The christening took place in the Princess of Wales’s bedchamber at St James’s, and according to custom, she remained in bed while the invited guests assembled around her. The tension between George I and his son was palpable, and the guests watched anxiously as the latter visibly struggled to suppress his rage. Henrietta was present, and later described the extraordinary scene that followed to Horace Walpole, who recorded it in his Reminiscences: ‘No sooner had the Bishop closed the ceremony, than the Prince crossing the feet of the bed in a rage, stepped up to the Duke of Newcastle, and holding up his hand and fore-finger in a menacing attitude, said, “You are a rascal, but I shall find you.”’ Unfortunately, thanks to the Prince’s strong German accent and his own very nervous temperament, Newcastle thought he had said ‘I’ll fight you.’ Appalled and confused, he rushed to consult his colleagues at court, and on their advice he went to the King and told him that he had been challenged. George did not wait to ask the Prince for his version of events, but instead took the remarkable step of placing him under house arrest. Henrietta recounted her astonishment when, going to the Princess’s apartments as usual the following morning, she was stopped in her tracks by Yeomen of the Guard who ‘pointed their halberds at my breast, & told me I must not pass’.11
The court had never known such drama, and the whole of London was agog with excitement. George had already earned a reputation for brutality among the English, who had heard the rumours about the murder of Count von Königsmarck and were now truly shocked that a king should arrest his own son. George called a cabinet, and was rumoured to have told his ministers that if he had been in Hanover he would have known precisely what to do with the Prince, but being in England he was forced to conform to the laws. The cabinet suggested negotiation, and emissaries were duly dispatched to Prince George, who was evidently somewhat unnerved by the incident and wrote letters full of respect for his father. They received no reply.
The Prince and Princess remained under arrest at St James’s for four days, and Henrietta continued to be refused access to her mistress. The cabinet grew increasingly anxious. Aware of the Habeas Corpus Act, by which no one could be detained without just cause, they tentatively suggested to the King that the Prince’s continued arrest might be regarded as a breach of the law. He grudgingly agreed to release his son, but rather than seeking a reconciliation, he promptly expelled the royal couple from court. In an act of spite, he also insisted that their children remain at St James’s.
The division in the royal household had dramatic repercussions for Henrietta. She and her husband could no longer continue living together at St James’s and serving their respective masters: a choice would have to be made between marital loyalty and official duty. This choice would have been far more difficult if the Howards had enjoyed any happiness together during their time at the palace. But Charles’s ill treatment of his wife had resumed almost immediately after they had taken up residence there.
His temper was fuelled by incessant drinking, and he found fault in everything she did. Her clothes were not fine enough, her acquaintances were irksome, her hours of service to the Princess interfered with the time at which he liked to take his meals. When Henrietta sought to remedy whatever caused him displeasure, this merely served to anger him more. In a long and impassioned letter that she wrote to her husband a decade later, she recalled every detail of those miserable days: ‘when under the dread of your resentment I got leave to dine or sup at the hours you liked I then too gave offence & you used to upbraid me with derision yt I was no longer in favour nor my attendance any longer necessary’. As time wore on, Charles’s behaviour grew ever more deplorable, and Henrietta came to live in fear for her life: ‘Your language to me was ye Grossest and most abusing,’ she complained, ‘you have call’d me names and have threatened to kick me and to brake my neck. I have often laid abed with you when I have been under apprehensions of your doing me a mischief and sometimes I have got out of bed for fear you shou’d.’12
Miserable though Henrietta’s life with Charles had been, it was no easy step to forsake her marriage vows in order to continue in the Princess’s service. Despite the lax morality that existed in the early Georgian court, the laws governing marriage were strict, and a woman was expected to tolerate all manner of ill treatment from her husband rather than risk the shame of separation. Violence, drunkenness and adultery were all too common in marriages, but they constituted insufficient grounds for action. Some women, such as Mary Astell (often hailed as the first English feminist), did speak out against this injustice: ‘To be yok’d for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper . . . to be denied ones most innocent desires, for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose Follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them; is a misery none can have a just idea of, but those who have felt it.’13 But such opinions were rarely voiced in the early eighteenth century, and the vast majority of women felt compelled by society and the law to maintain their silence even if faced with the most extreme provocation.
Desperate to escape her miserable marriage, but equally afraid of destroying her reputation at a time when rumours were already circulating about her friendship with the Prince, Henrietta agonised over what to do. Not trusting any of her friends at court enough to confide in them, she committed her feelings to paper. Charles, she said, had ruled her ‘with Tyranny; with Cruelty, my life in Danger’, and she reasoned: ‘Self preservation is ye first law of nature, are married women then ye only part of human nature yt must not follow it?’ She went on to express views that were astonishingly radical for the time, arguing that women had ‘superiour sense, superiour fortitude and reason’ to men, and therefore questioning ‘how dangerous is Power in womens hands? Do I know so many miserable wives from mans Tyranick power.’ Henrietta knew, though, that reason and justice alone were not enough to protect her reputation if she were to leave her husband, and she ended her soliloquy with a note of despair: ‘his honour is now mine: had I none before I married? Can I devide them? how loose his, and keep my own?’14
When the Prince and Princess had made the necessary preparations to leave court and Henrietta’s decision could no longer be delayed, she attempted to discuss the matter with her husband in the hope of reaching a compromise. But Charles scorned the very idea that his wife should continue in the Princess’s service, and a furious row ensued. In a show of defiance, Henrietta at once left their apartments without pausing to gather her belongings, and went with all haste to join her mistress.
Consumed with rage, Charles sent a message to her saying that he no longer considered her his wife and ordering the removal of her possessions from their apartments. Henrietta calmly complied with his wishes and sent a servant to carry out the task. Although she apologised for the ‘impertinent’ things she had said in the heat of the moment, she made it clear that her decision to leave was final. The thought of returning to her husband, whose punishment of her disobedience was bound to be severe, was now completely abhorrent to her. It was in vain that she reasoned with him to ‘give me leave with the greatest submission, to desire you will reflect, upon all our former way of living, and those unhappy circumstances we have been in; and judge if the prospect of returning to that must not be very Terrible to me’.15
Furious at his wife’s continued defiance, and egged on by the King, who was determined to make life difficult for his son and daughter-in-law, Charles wrote again to demand that she return to him, threatening to resort to the law if she refused. ‘The unparalell’d treatment of your behaviour to me, has twice endanger’d my ruine; and since I find you persevere in your defiance to my recalling you home again, send this to acquaint you, what I am determin’d to do; I have consulted (I beleive) as good opinions for your comeing to me, as I know you have lately done to support the Contrary, and depend upon it I will put them in execution; therefore tis left to your Choice, forceing me to those measures, or avoiding them by Compliance; if you have any sense of Virtue left, or reflexion of reason, you shall find better treatment from me, then I am sure you must in your self be convinced you can deserve; but if this meets any farther denyal, I will immediately take such methods, as the Law prescribes in Your Case.’16
At the mention of legal action, Henrietta shrewdly changed tack and affected astonishment that Charles was demanding her return when he had ‘expressly abandon’d me and dismiss’d me from living any more with you’. She added, with perhaps more conviction than she felt: ‘I have but too good reason to fear worse treatment than I believe the law of England allowes, and in such cases I have always heard a wife is protected.’17 Her refusal to give in to Charles’s bullying won her the support of the Princess, in whose service she remained, free at last from her husband’s tyranny.
But freedom had come at a price. Just as the King had retained the Prince and Princess’s children at court, so Charles insisted that their young son Henry must stay with him. Worse still, he forbade Henrietta from visiting him, despite all her entreaties, and resolved to raise the boy to despise her. He could not have exacted a crueller revenge upon his wife’s first act of defiance.