Chapter 8
THE PRINCE OF WALES’S attentions to Henrietta had been increasing steadily since the summer at Hampton Court in 1716, and by the time the royal party moved to Leicester House the following year, ambitious courtiers and politicians were beginning to seek preferment through her intervention. While the friendship between them was becoming closer, it had not yet become a physical liaison. Indeed, the Prince’s attentions were at that time focused upon another.
Mary Bellenden, who was lauded as one of the greatest beauties at court, had become the object of royal desire soon after the move to Leicester House. Lord Hervey claimed that she was ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating and the most likeable woman of her time, made up of every ingredient likely to engage or attach a lover’.1 Like Henrietta, Miss Bellenden had attracted many of the poets and wits who hung about court, including Gay, who described her as ‘smiling Mary, soft and fair as down’.2But their admiration was rather shallower than the esteem they held for Henrietta, for Mary had little of the wit and learning of her fellow court lady. This was no barrier to the affections of the Prince, with his aversion to intellectuals and abhorrence for learning in women. He therefore used every strategy he knew to get her into bed. Miss Bellenden felt no reciprocal passion, however, and rejected his clumsy advances. She later confided to Henrietta that her tactics had been to ‘cross her armes’ at him whenever he approached.3
But the Prince was not to be so easily deterred. Mary was notoriously short of money and often complained to friends of her penniless state. ‘O gad I am so sick of bills for my part, I believe I shall never be able to hear ’em mention’d without casting up my accounts,’ she told Henrietta. ‘I have paid one this morning as Long as my arme, & as broad as my bum.’4 Knowing of the lady’s impoverishment, George resolved to impress her with his wealth. One evening at court, he sat by her and, with a great flourish, took out his purse and began laboriously counting out his money. Miss Bellenden was singularly unimpressed. ‘The Prince’s gallantry was by no means delicate; & his avarice disgusted her,’ wrote Horace Walpole, who later heard the whole tale from Henrietta. Mistaking her aversion for coyness, George repeated the performance a second time, at which the lady lost all patience and cried out: ‘Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.’ As Walpole wryly observed: ‘The chink of gold did not tempt her more than the person of his Royal Highness.’5
Mary Bellenden’s decided rejection of the Prince’s advances may seem surprising given the prestige that could be gained from a liaison with him. But she was in fact already deeply in love with another. Colonel John Campbell was one of the Prince’s Grooms of the Bedchamber, and Mary had been instantly attracted to him. The Prince suspected that her affections lay elsewhere and tried to cajole her into revealing the identity of her lover by promising that he would do what he could for the couple, provided that she agreed not to marry without his sanction. Mary assented to the latter part of the bargain but would not tell him who her lover was. Then, fearing that he would discover it anyway and break up their liaison, she promptly did exactly what she had promised not to and married Colonel Campbell in secret. The Prince never forgave her, and whenever she appeared at court after that, ‘tho trembling at what she knew she was to undergo’, he always stepped up to her and ‘whispered some very harsh reproach in her ear’.6
According to Hervey, Henrietta spied the opportunity created by Miss Bellenden’s rejection of the Prince and stepped in to take her place in his affections. ‘By this conduct she left Mrs Howard, who had more steadiness and more perseverance, to try what she could make of a game which the other had found so tedious and unprofitable that she had no pleasure in playing it and saw little to be won by minding it.’7 It seems unlikely, however that Henrietta set out to excite the Prince’s passion in such a calculated fashion. Although living apart from her husband, she still took her marriage vows seriously, and her decision to leave him had only been made after the fiercest of battles with her conscience. She had been anxious to protect her reputation and avoid any further scandal, and had succeeded in winning respect throughout the court as a modest and virtuous woman.
It is doubtful that the Prince presented a more appealing prospect to her than he had to Mary Bellenden. His physical charms were rather limited. Always on the short and stout side, his figure had not benefited from the lavish dining that he had enjoyed during his years at court. Neither had his countenance been improved by the frequent bouts of rage that consumed him, which would inevitably cause his face to turn a deep red and his already bulbous eyes to bulge even more. Whenever his temper was severely provoked, he would make a ridiculous spectacle of himself by stamping and kicking his wig around the room: hardly the Prince Charming of romantic legend.
But for all that, the Prince of Wales was of course irresistible in one important respect: he offered the chance of prestige and influence at court. This was a seductive prospect for Henrietta, whose memories of poverty and deprivation were still fresh in her mind. As her friend Horace Walpole shrewdly observed: ‘nor do I suppose that love had any share in the sacrifice she made of her virtue. She had felt poverty, and was far from disliking power.’8 She therefore began to encourage the Prince’s increasingly obvious advances.
Love did not seem to feature very highly in the Prince’s actions either. While he flirted with the ladies at court, he was passionately in love with his wife, and even after thirteen years of marriage still preferred her bed to any other. He would hasten there every evening after dinner, and whenever business took him away from court, he would whisk Caroline off to the royal bedchamber as soon as he returned, much to the ribaldry and amusement of the courtiers standing by. No other woman was even fit to ‘buckle her shoe’, he once said, and this was borne out by all of his actions.
Nevertheless, George, like his father, thought it essential to enhance his royal status (not to mention his male dignity) by cultivating an image as a man of gallantry. From the very earliest times, kings had taken mistresses, whether for status, companionship or physical gratification. Far from being hidden away, these mistresses often came to enjoy positions of influence at court. They had close and easy access to the King, and were often confidantes and advisers as well as lovers. As such, they represented one of the surest means for statesmen, officials and ambitious place-hunters to gain favour with the sovereign. If a mistress fell pregnant, it was not uncommon for their bastard offspring to be given high-ranking positions or prestigious estates. One of the most lustful British kings of recent times had been Charles II, whose court was filled with the most beautiful women in Europe. Some of his former mistresses still frequented the early Georgian court, as did those of his successors. For example, the Duchess of Portsmouth bumped into Lady Dorchester, mistress of James II, and Lady Orkney, mistress of William III at a drawing room one evening. ‘Who would have thought that we three whores should have met here!’ the latter is said to have exclaimed.9
With such an impressive track record set by his royal forebears, Prince George was not about to let the side down. Furthermore, he was anxious to demonstrate by taking a mistress that he was not ruled by his wife. Horace Walpole derided him for being ‘more attracted by a silly idea he had entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety; & he added the more egregious folly of fancying that his Inconstancy proved he was not governed’. A mistress was therefore as important a part of his household as a valet, coachman or Groom of the Stole. As Lord Hervey observed, the Prince seemed to ‘look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man’.10
Necessary she may have been, but it was equally imperative that a mistress should do nothing to disturb the rigid orders and ceremonials of the Prince’s daily life. Henrietta was ideal in this respect. She was patient and compliant, and George rightly supposed that she would give him little trouble. Her discretion was an added bonus and would prevent any unnecessary tittle-tattle about his prowess as a lover.
The affair between Mrs Howard and the Prince of Wales was therefore born less of passion than of convenience. George was expected to take a mistress, so he chose one who would cause as little disruption to the order of his life as possible. Henrietta, meanwhile, was prepared to fulfil the role in expectation that it would augment her position at court and secure her future prosperity.
There are no surviving love letters or other contemporary accounts that suggest a tender or prolonged courtship. The affair probably began during the Prince and Princess’s stay at Richmond, from June to September 1718. The atmosphere among the royal household was always more relaxed and convivial during these annual retreats, and the formal public occasions tended to be replaced by more intimate supper parties or evening strolls around the gardens and parkland surrounding the Lodge. The potential for discreet romantic liaisons was therefore greater than amidst the public formalities of Leicester House and St James’s.
Princess Caroline was somewhat indisposed that summer, as she was expecting her seventh child and the pregnancy was proving a troublesome one.11 Whether this prompted George to seek diversion elsewhere, or whether the long, sultry days during which he was surrounded by the alluring ladies of his wife’s household sharpened his sexual appetite, is not certain. Whichever was the case, he now became fixated with ‘pretty Mrs Howard’, the modest and attractive lady whom he had first met four years earlier in Hanover.
The first indication that their relationship had developed from the platonic to the physical was an observation by a contemporary at court that the Prince had started to spend every evening (some ‘three or four hours’) in her apartments. At first they were joined by Miss Bellenden and some of the Princess’s other ladies, but after a time his visits became ‘uninterrupted tête-à-têtes’ with Mrs Howard. In his diary of court events, Lord Egmont noted with some astonishment that George would ‘spend hours alone with her when none else was admitted’. Their affair was conducted with the clockwork regularity so typical of the Prince. Onlookers at court noted that he would enter Henrietta’s apartments at precisely seven o’clock every evening ‘with such dull punctuality, that he frequently walked about his chamber for ten minutes with his watch in his hand, if the stated minute was not arrived’.12
Exactly how the Prince and Mrs Howard passed the three or four hours every evening alone together was a source of much speculation among the courtiers and politicians who hung about in the public rooms beyond. The rather clinical way in which he conducted the liaison, always with one eye on the clock, led some to doubt that he ‘entered into any commerce with her, that he might not innocently have had with his daughter’.13 The punctuality of the Prince’s visits should not necessarily be taken as evidence of a lack of passion, however, for he was obsessed with routine and measured his movements by the clock. Just as he visited Henrietta at the same time every evening, so he always retired to his wife’s bed for two hours after dinner, which was always taken at the same hour, and even the slightest deviation from his accustomed habits would send him into a fury.
Moreover, the Prince lacked the subtlety to conduct an affair purely for show and, in contrast to his new mistress, was not given to concealing his true emotions. ‘The fire of his temper appeared in every look and gesture,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘which, being under the direction of a small understanding, was every day throwing him upon some indiscretion.’14 He was also of a very lascivious nature and sought women’s company for physical rather than intellectual stimulation. Lord Chesterfield wrote of the ‘animal spirits’ which governed his actions, and Horace Walpole observed that ‘unfortunately his Majesty’s passions were too indelicate to have been confined to platonic love for a Woman’. He dismissed as ‘a ridiculous pretence’ the notion that theirs was a ‘meer friendship’, and pointed out that George was ‘the last man in the world to have taste for talking sentiments, and that with a woman who was deaf!’15
The early Georgian court was, besides, hardly a temple of morality. Sex, scandal, flirtation, infidelity, intrigues and elopements were as much a part of daily life as the formal levees, dinners, drawing rooms and other ceremonials. Masquerade balls, which were a regular occurrence at Leicester House, became a cover for wanton behaviour. They presented infinite possibilities for amorous encounters, as masks and costumes released guests from the strict decorum that usually governed social occasions. Sultans were seen making love to nuns, and not all of the nuns were female. John James Heidegger, who as Master of the Revels presided over these gatherings, was denounced by a Middlesex jury as the source of all vice and immorality. In an effort to placate such prudish opinion, masquerades were subsequently renamed ridottos, but nothing else about them changed.
The ladies of the Princess’s household were esteemed more for their beauty and vivacity than for their virtue. Prudery was viewed as a singularly unattractive quality in women. Pope wrote of it in a verse dedicated to the Maids of Honour at court:
What is prudery?
’Tis a beldam
Seen with wit and beauty seldom.
’Tis a virgin hard of feature,
Old and void of all good nature
Most of these ladies were maids in name only and had precious little honour. Sophia Howe’s wild spirits caused many lively scenes at Leicester House, and she also wreaked havoc during her visits to the country. She wrote to Henrietta on one such sojourn: ‘You will think I supose that I have had no flirtation since I am here but you will be mistaken,’ and went on to boast of her various conquests.16 Soon after her return to court, Miss Howe fell for the charms of a young gallant, Anthony Lowther, and eloped with him. But Lowther proved unworthy of the lady’s affections, treating her cruelly and refusing to marry her. She was therefore forced to return to her mother’s house, her reputation in tatters, and died – it is said of a broken heart – a few years later.
Sophia was far from being the only girl of uncertain virtue at court. Miss Mary Chamber, another friend of Henrietta, was devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and regaled her with lurid tales of her adventures. ‘All sorts of Diversions are in great plenty here,’ she once wrote from Tunbridge Wells, ‘but I think Ravishing is the most prevailing entertainment.’ She also recounted a trial that was the talk of the town, in which a man had been accused of forcing himself upon a woman. The case had been thrown out when the judge had asked the ‘victim’ to name the time and place that the accident had occurred, and she had answered ‘that was impossible for her to tell because it lasted for a quarter of a year together’. Margaret Bradshaw, meanwhile, who was a relative of Mrs Howard, boasted to her that she fully expected to find favour with the King when she visited court, ‘for my Bubbys are mightily grown since you saw me’. She added: ‘I veryly beleve if he were once in my Parlour, & I in good humour he’d never go home again, for I have very wining ways with me when I think fitt to show my parts which I wont do to every body.’17
In such an environment, the likelihood of a platonic liaison between a highly sexed prince and an attractive Woman of the Bedchamber was slim indeed. Lord Hervey may have tried to downplay the affair out of loyalty to Princess Caroline, but Henrietta was far from being mistress in name only. Her closest friends knew the truth, although, as Horace Walpole observed, they pretended not to. ‘From the propriety & decency of her behaviour [she] was always treated as if her virtue had never been question’d, her friends even affecting to suppose that her connection [with the Prince] had been confined to pure friendship.’18 Henrietta’s irreverent cousin, Margaret Bradshaw, showed no such discretion and teased her about the loss of her virtue: ‘A Courtier is a detestable thing & I am glad none of my famely are so, for lett people come of Ever such honest parents, they are soon corruptyed. Mrs Howard’s father was a sure naile [but] his Daughter proves a rotten Pegg.’19
There may have been another, more compelling, piece of evidence that the affair between the Prince of Wales and Henrietta Howard was of a sexual nature. Within her correspondence are two letters which contain the merest hint of a pregnancy. In August 1718, Carr, Lord Hervey, whose younger brother John kept him informed of events at court, wrote to Henrietta at Richmond: ‘the most pleasing account I can have from Richmond will be that of your being in good health, & not wanting to be told you are grown bulky’. This may of course have been a light-hearted warning that she should avoid ruining her famously slim figure by overindulging in the rich foods that were on offer at court, and on its own it is certainly not enough to indicate that she was thought to be with child. But then a few months later, in May 1719, Mrs Howard received a letter from the daughter of James Welwood, her trusted Hobart family solicitor whom she had known since childhood. The postscript of the letter, apparently written in haste, reads: ‘I wont say a word of the cradle.’20
There are no further references to this, and in fact Henrietta’s correspondence becomes very patchy between the autumn of 1718 and the summer of 1719. This in itself may be significant, but it cannot be taken as reliable proof that she had borne her royal lover a child during that time. What is more convincing in this respect is that George was rumoured to have awarded Henrietta an annual pension of £2,000 from around the time that their affair began. This was a considerable sum (equivalent to more than £250,000 today), particularly for a man not renowned for his generosity. There is no trace of it in the official records, although the Treasury Papers for the year 1718 indicate that the Prince granted her an additional allowance of £100 per year, and several similar amounts are recorded in the years that follow. These papers also show that her apartments were made more comfortable by the addition of such luxuries as crimson silk-lined curtains and mahogany furniture.21 Again, taken on their own, these gifts and grants of money indicate nothing more than that Mrs Howard was a favourite of the Prince, and are not substantial enough proof that they were intended to help support a child.
There is also the question of whether Henrietta, however discreet she was, would have been able to hide a pregnancy from the prying eyes of court. The full-skirted dresses that were then in fashion would have helped to conceal the physical signs. Furthermore, although she was required to be in more or less constant attendance, she was often reported to be indisposed, and on one occasion she had to be excused from duty for several weeks. If she had given birth during this time, then the child could quite easily have been passed off as her brother’s. John Hobart had married in 1717, and his wife Judith had produced a child almost every year after that. The births and baptisms of five of the seven children were recorded in the register of Blickling church. The two exceptions were Robert, who died in infancy, and Dorothy, who was one of only two Hobart children to survive into adulthood.
This latter child would later come to live with Henrietta at court, following the death of John Hobart’s wife in 1727. Although she was fond of children in general, Henrietta showed a partiality towards Dorothy that would last a lifetime. In the only known surviving portrait of the girl, there are striking similarities with the facial features of George II. She has the same large, almost bulbous eyes, together with a long straight nose and high forehead. Her appearance is also similar to that of George II’s daughters by Caroline, in particular Princess Amelia.
The fact that it is almost impossible to say for certain whether Henrietta bore her royal lover’s child poses an interesting question in itself. Royal bastards were hardly shocking: indeed, it had long been common for kings and princes to openly acknowledge and provide for them. They were, after all, valuable proof of their virility. So why would Henrietta try to conceal a pregnancy? That she had a husband was not reason enough on its own. There are many examples of married royal mistresses throughout history, and besides, Henrietta was already estranged from Charles. Furthermore, as the Prince’s official mistress, it was a little late to be overcome by an attack of morality. But then Charles Howard was a violent man, and it is possible that Henrietta dared not risk provoking him by allowing it to be common knowledge that she was having another man’s child. She may also have feared that this would prejudice her son Henry against her, and would make it even less likely that she could win custody of him.
Another possibility is that she was so proud of her reputation as a ‘Woman of Reason’, the darling of the poets and playwrights of Georgian England, that she did not wish it to be overshadowed by the knowledge that she had borne a royal bastard. This may also explain the ambiguity of her relationship with George. She could have encouraged the notion that it was entirely platonic because she wanted to be known as something more than just a royal mistress. She had long cherished intellectual ambitions and was a fierce critic of women’s subservience to men, so it is likely that her affair with the Prince – while necessary to her advancement – was also something of an embarrassment to her. The truth of this would be borne out by subsequent events.
The lack of documentary proof to support either theory is frustrating. It is possible that this was destroyed, whether by Henrietta, her family, or the prudish Victorian editor who assembled her correspondence for publication. Or it may be that Henrietta was so successful in hiding the truth from her contemporaries that no evidence ever existed. Given the preponderance of published memoirs and letters from the period, the latter seems more likely. One can hardly imagine Lord Hervey omitting such a piece of scandal from his memoirs if it was known about at court. Whatever the case, the tantalising suggestion of a secret pregnancy adds to the enigma of Henrietta’s character, as well as of her relationship with the Prince of Wales.
If Henrietta had hoped to gain considerable influence over the Prince through her affair with him, she was to be disappointed. George despised the way that his father was ruled by his two mistresses, Mesdames Schulenburg and Kielmansegg, and was determined not to fall into the same trap. According to her adversary at court, Lord Hervey, Henrietta was deeply embarrassed to be in the position of having all the semblance of power with no capacity to execute it. ‘Notwithstanding her making use of the proper tools, the stuff she had to work with was so stubborn and so inductile that her labour was in vain,’ he observed, ‘her situation was such as would have been insupportable to anyone whose pride was less supple, whose passions less governable, and whose sufferance less inexhaustible.’22
The Prince was, apparently, under the influence of only one woman, and that was his wife Caroline. She appeared to manage him so expertly that she was able to get her own way without ever seeming to, and soothed his violent fits of temper with apparent compliance and humility. She spent many hours with her husband each day, schooling herself into ‘saying what she did not think, assenting to what she did not believe, and praising what she did not approve’, in order to insinuate her opinions ‘as jugglers do a cord, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon’.23
Caroline’s skill in manipulating the Prince was well known at court. The ideal wife in Pope’s Of the Characters of Women was based upon her:
She, who ne’er answers till a Husband cools,
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules;
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,
Yet has the humour most, when she obeys.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, meanwhile, claimed that the Princess ‘had that genius which qualified her for the government of a fool’, and that her first thought on marriage had been ‘to secure herself the sole and whole direction of her spouse; and to that purpose counterfeited the most extravagant fondness for his person’.24
Caroline realised that to win real power, she needed an accomplice in government. Sir Robert Walpole, the chief minister, was the ideal candidate. The two were described as being like ‘leaves on the same twig’. Both were cunning, intelligent, coarse-fibred, full of appetite for life and, above all, had an insatiable lust for power. Their alliance was forged by the knowledge that each was indispensable to the other. Walpole knew that in Caroline lay the real route to influence over the Prince. It was said that he had discovered early on that whatever ‘galantries’ the Prince might indulge in, ‘the person of his Princess was dearer to him than any charms in his Mistresses’. Furthermore, although Henrietta was George’s declared favourite, the wily minister perceived ‘that the power would be lodged with the wife, not with the Mistress’. He therefore disregarded the latter and abstained from joining the throng in her apartments, which won him the lasting respect and trust of the Princess. In paying his court to her, rather than Henrietta, it was said he ‘had the right sow by the ear’.25
Walpole also appealed to Caroline’s vanity by telling her that he could do nothing without her, and that she was ‘the sole mover of this court; whenever your hand stops, everything must stand still, and whenever that spring is changed, the whole system and every inferior wheel must be changed too’. The Princess was equally aware of how indispensable Walpole was to her plans: the Prince would tolerate advice from a minister, but he would never do so from a woman.
They were joined in their alliance by Lord Hervey, who was a staunch supporter of Walpole and outspoken in his Whiggish beliefs. In truth, however, it was his wit rather than his politics that really drew Caroline to him. She was delighted by the irreverence of his humour, which did not scruple to make fun of her husband, and the two became so close that there were inevitably scurrilous rumours that they were having an affair. Hervey was as disdainful of George as he was admiring of the Princess, and in his memoirs he portrayed him as an impotent fool who was entirely ruled by his wife.
The Prince knew people sneered that Caroline governed him, and he hated it. He would do everything possible to prove them wrong, often to the point of humiliating her in front of the entire court, laughing at her ignorance over matters of state or flying into a rage if she dared to voice an opinion that was not his own. The Princess met all of this with ‘the obsequiousness of the most patient slave to the most intemperate master’. She returned every insult with flattery and every contradiction with acquiescence, and ‘with the implicit resignation of the most rigid Christian, whenever he smote one cheek turned the other’.26
Caroline’s tolerance of her husband’s behaviour extended to his romantic liaisons with her ladies at court. Far from being affronted by his blatant infidelity, she seemed actively to encourage it on the grounds that anything that brought him pleasure was also a source of joy to her. One courtier observed that she was ‘so devoted to his pleasures (which she often told him were the rule of all her thoughts and actions), that whenever he thought proper to find them with other women, she even loved whoever was instrumental to his entertainment’. If the late-eighteenth-century historian William Coxe is to be believed, this was all an act. ‘Never wife felt or lamented a husband’s infidelities more than herself,’ he claimed, arguing that Caroline’s ‘forced complacency’ was only achieved through a ‘violent effort’.27 But it is unlikely that she was suffering any such inner turmoil. Her tolerance almost certainly sprang from a calculated strategy rather than the saintly forbearance that she was so keen to display to the world, for it helped her to manipulate the Prince – provided that the object of his extramarital attentions was sufficiently malleable.
The Princess had, in any case, been bred to accept infidelity as the natural course of royal marriages. The courts in which she had undergone her royal training had hardly been conspicuous for their morality. Electress Sophia had for years not merely tolerated but welcomed the Countess of Platen as the mistress of her husband. Her daughter, who had married the King of Prussia, had followed the same policy towards his other women. By contrast, the actions of George I’s ill-fated wife, Sophia Dorothea, had provided an example of what not to do. Objecting to his blatant infidelity by taking a lover of her own had earned her a lifetime’s imprisonment at Ahlden.
If Caroline had been raised a pragmatist in her views of royal marriage, then she also had another reason to accept her husband’s infidelity with a readiness bordering on the enthusiastic. Being obliged to spend ‘7 or 8 hours tête-à-tête’ with him every day was quite a burden, given his choleric temper, tedious conversation and boorish manners. The Princess was therefore only too happy to be relieved of his company for a few hours. Moreover, she judged that the mild and compliant Mrs Howard would pose little threat to her own hold over the Prince. ‘Tho’ she was at that time very handsome, it gave her Majesty no jealousy or uneasiness,’ remarked one courtier.28
But Caroline was not a woman who left things to fate. For all of Henrietta’s apparent modesty, she was still spending three or four hours alone with Prince George every day, and she might well use some of her acclaimed intellect to try to influence his opinions. She was also a magnet for members of the Opposition in government, notably Lord Bolingbroke, the powerful Tory peer who had been dismissed from his position as Secretary of State upon George I’s accession. Some of her literary circle, including Pope and Gay, were also of that party, and used her evening gatherings to discuss affairs of state, as well as to exchange ideas for their poetry and satires. In courting such associates, Henrietta made an enemy of Sir Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whig administration in government and arguably one of the most powerful men in the country. Slowly but surely, two enemy camps began to form at Leicester House: the Whig party led by the Princess and Walpole, and the Tory sympathisers who attached themselves to the Prince of Wales’s mistress. Given Caroline’s clever manipulation of her husband, the former party was clearly in the ascendancy, but as long as Henrietta remained his mistress, she would always be a focus for the Opposition.
Caroline therefore did everything she could to minimise the risk posed by her rival. She began by using the means that were directly under her control, namely Henrietta’s position in her household. As Woman of the Bedchamber, Henrietta had an array of duties to occupy her time. It was far from being the sinecure that many of the higher-ranking positions constituted. Yet she had so far been treated kindly by Caroline, who seemed to value her as much for her companionship as for her usefulness in the household. All of this was to change when she became the Prince of Wales’s mistress. The Princess was determined that henceforth she would carry out every duty to the letter. Addressing Henrietta with great condescension as ‘my dear Howard’, she began to inflict ever more menial tasks upon her.
During the ceremony of dressing, it was the job of the Woman of the Bedchamber to hold the basin while the Princess washed. From now on, Caroline insisted that Henrietta perform this task on bended knee. Henrietta tolerated this at first, but as her mistress heaped more and more indignities on her, she rebelled. In a rare outburst of temper, ‘with her fierce little eyes, and cheeks as red as your coat’, she told her mistress ‘that positively she would not do it’. The Princess, who recounted the whole incident to Lord Hervey, answered calmly but firmly, as one would to a naughty child: ‘Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will. Go, go! fie for shame! Go, my good Howard; we will talk of this another time.’29
Determined not to suffer this humiliation again, Henrietta made enquiries into the exact duties of her role, and called upon precedents to help her. She sought the advice of Abigail Masham, former Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne. Unfortunately, Mrs Masham confirmed that the post-holder was indeed required to kneel when holding the wash-basin, so the Princess had been entirely justified in her request.30 What appeared on the surface to be a trivial matter was in fact a major point of principle, and Henrietta knew that henceforth she would have no choice but to submit to the Princess’s requests. Caroline was triumphant and could not resist the opportunity to gloat. ‘About a week after, when upon maturer deliberation she had done everything about the basin that I would have her, I told her I knew we should be good friends again,’ she confided to Hervey, ‘but could not help adding, in a little more serious voice, that I owned of all my servants I had least expected, as I had least deserved it, such treatment from her.’31
Caroline proved adept at using Henrietta’s position in her household to reinforce her own superiority. That Henrietta had been her Woman of the Bedchamber for some years before the affair began was a distinct advantage, because it meant that the precedent of obedience had already been firmly set. It had been a very different situation for Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II. Upon her arrival in England, she had been dismayed to discover that her husband-to-be had appointed his then heavily pregnant mistress, Lady Castlemaine, as her Lady of the Bedchamber. Catherine had demanded that the appointment be revoked, but Charles had been adamant, insisting: ‘I like her company and conversation, from which I will not be restrained, because I know there is and will be all innocence in it.’ He had later repeated the exercise with another mistress, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. His wife had been unable to hide her distress at this further indignity. ‘This day, the Queen being at dinner, the Duchesse of Portsmouth, as a lady of the bedchamber, came to wait on her,’ observed a bystander at court, ‘which putt the Queen into that disorder that tears came into her eyes, whilst the other laughed and turned [it] into jest.’32
Caroline’s manipulation of her husband’s mistress was further aided by her knowledge of the latter’s vulnerability. She knew full well that Henrietta’s husband had frittered away their modest fortune on drinking and gambling, and that without her position at court, she would face almost certain ruin. She also knew that Henrietta’s abiding terror was that she would be forced to return to this violent and abusive man, who had subjected her to years of misery before her escape to Leicester House. Moreover, etiquette demanded that no direct reference to the affair could ever be made by two well-bred women, so in theory at least Henrietta’s only role at court was in the Princess’s household. It was in any case uncertain how long the affair would last. All of this gave the Princess a significant advantage over her rival, and she did not scruple to remind her of it whenever possible. After the incident with the wash-basin, Caroline told Henrietta that ‘she knew I had held her up at a time when it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop thro’ my fingers – thus–.’33 Henceforth, she could torment her Woman of the Bedchamber to her heart’s content.
In examining Prince George’s relationships with Caroline and Henrietta, it seems that there was almost a role reversal between the wife and the mistress. The passion he felt for the former was obvious to everyone at court, and it had diminished little during the thirteen years of their marriage. When he took other women, he delighted in telling Caroline every detail of his conquest: from wooing to sexual technique. He even wrote to her about them, and one letter, describing the seduction of a young woman he met in Hanover, ran to a staggering forty pages. In return, Caroline displayed all the traits of a mistress, by using his passion to further her political ambitions, by putting aside her intellectual tastes to feign enthusiasm for his tedious conversation, and by meeting his fits of temper and rudeness with meek compliance. Above all, she took pleasure in humiliating the woman who was bound to him by duty and convention.
George’s relationship with Henrietta, meanwhile, was apparently governed more by the clock than by passion, and his primary motivation in taking her as his mistress seemed to be a desire to conform with tradition. If Henrietta’s enemies at court were to be believed, he got little pleasure from their connection and came to resent her as much as he would a tiresome wife. Lord Hervey, who was among them, claimed: ‘She was forced to live in the constant subjection of a wife with all the reproach of a mistress and to flatter and manage a man whom she must see and feel had as little inclination to her person as regard to her advice.’34
But the Prince was not completely devoid of affection for Henrietta. In his account of events at court, the politician and diarist John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, speculated that it was Henrietta’s ‘good sense and agreeable carriage’ that drew George to her.35 She may not have had his wife’s voluptuous figure, but she was still an attractive woman. When the affair began, she was twenty-nine years of age and was widely admired for her ‘handsome’ and ‘pleasing’ appearance. Her best feature was her long hair, which Lord Chesterfield described as ‘remarkably fine’. Its natural colour was chestnut brown, but Henrietta tended to lighten it with dye. This may have been for the benefit of the Prince, whose weakness for blondes was well known at court.
Henrietta’s fair hair is shown off to great effect in a portrait of her commissioned by Pope. Wearing an elegant low-fronted dress with pearls looped across the bodice, revealing the chemise, she presents an attractive and enigmatic figure. Her skin has a soft ivory hue which contrasts with the deep blue of her eyes, and her steady gaze transfixes the viewer. Her high forehead and long nose make her a striking rather than conventional beauty, but she has a pleasing, dignified appearance that commands interest and respect in equal measure. With one hand raised to her cheek in an apparently contemplative pose, she appears every bit the enlightened philosopher, yet the faint smile that plays about her lips suggests humour and warmth. In another portrait, she is shown in a more formal setting, dressed for a masquerade ball in clothes of the latest fashion. Her slim waist is made narrower still by a stiff-boned corset, and her hair is neatly tucked under a hat, but her dark eyes show an intelligence and independence that no amount of court etiquette can suppress.
Henrietta’s sense of style was one of her greatest attractions. Horace Walpole said that she was ‘always well drest with taste & simplicity’. At one state occasion, she and her fellow Woman of the Bedchamber, Mrs Herbert, were described as being ‘the two finest figures of all the procession’. She had worn a scarlet dress with a silver trimming and appeared ‘so rich, so genteel, so perfectly well dressed’ that she won the admiration of many onlookers.36
Henrietta’s features mirrored her passive demeanour. William Warburton, a leading theologian at court, described her as ‘singularly young looking; she is incapable of the keen feeling and passionate sorrow which might mark the brow with lines and fade the cheek. The only expression of her face is a sweet and gentle repose.’ Lord Chesterfield echoed his observations, and referred to her countenance as ‘an undecided one’ which ‘announced neither good nor ill nature, neither sense nor the want of it, neither vivacity nor dullness’.37
Mrs Howard had a number of admirers at court, including the members of her literary circle, all of whom sought to immortalise her attractions in poetry and prose. She was Pope’s ‘handsome’ woman of ‘A Certain Lady at Court’, the ‘angel . . . so fair’ of Peterborough’s ‘Song’, and a ‘shadow like an angel with bright hair’ to John Gay. William Byrd, a pious American traveller and frequent visitor to Leicester House, met ‘pretty Mrs Howard’ soon after her affair with the Prince began, and was instantly smitten. His diary is full of references to conversations they had engaged in, and on one occasion he enjoyed her company so much that after leaving court he felt compelled to take a woman into his coach and ‘commit uncleanness’, before returning home to say his prayers.38
While Henrietta was not a conventional beauty, she certainly had something in her appearance or character that drew men to her. The Prince had singled her out from a host of – arguably prettier – ladies in his wife’s household. There is also some indication that, at least in the early days of their liaison, he felt some affection for her. A gossip at court noted that she once received a ‘billet doux’ from her royal master, and when the Princess summoned her to attend, she hastily stuffed this down her bosom. In curtseying before her mistress, however, unbeknown to her the note fell out. When Caroline found it she called Henrietta back and thrust the offending note at her, coldly bidding her to take more care of her secrets in future.39
If Prince George harboured a little more affection for his mistress, however fleeting, than her enemies at court have claimed, then their assertion that she had no influence over him should also be qualified. Henrietta was certainly never a mistress of the calibre of Louise de Keroualle or Anne Boleyn in terms of political power or social prestige. No landmark events of state can be credited to her influence. Neither was she able to secure great riches through her position. George was notoriously mean, and although he had increased her annual allowance when she became his mistress, this paled into insignificance when compared to the bounty received by other royal favourites. William III had given Elizabeth Villiers all of King James II’s private estates in Ireland, the income from which was valued at £26,000 per year. The Duchess of Portsmouth, meanwhile, had received in excess of £100,000 in gifts and bribes from Charles II and his ministers, not to mention the priceless jewels and other ‘trinkets’ that her royal master gave her. The Venetian ambassador was astonished by ‘the quantity of gold which the King has given and which he lavishes daily upon his most favoured lady’.40
Henrietta may not have been in the same league as these women when it came to being rewarded for sacrificing her virtue, but she was at least able to win favour for a number of her friends and family. John Campbell, Duke of Argyll, who was among her close associates, rose considerably in power and prestige in the Prince’s court at this time. He was appointed Lord Steward of the Household, and in 1719 was created Duke of Greenwich. His younger brother Archibald, Lord Ilay, also a friend of Mrs Howard, experienced a similar upturn in fortune. While she resisted most applications from those seeking a particular place at court or in government, she did secure some prestigious appointments for her brother, John Hobart. He was made a Knight of the Bath in 1725, Treasurer of the Chamber in 1727, and Baron Hobart of Blickling in 1728.
As well as furthering the cause of those close to her, Henrietta was occasionally able to thwart the designs of her enemies at court. She lent her support to Sir Spencer Compton, Speaker of the House of Commons, in his battle for supremacy over Walpole, and was so successful in persuading the Prince of his merits that he later raised him to one of the highest offices in the land. In so doing, she set herself in opposition to the Princess, who was Walpole’s greatest ally at court. Lord Hervey, who was also in their camp, observed with barely concealed resentment that the mistress was able to work on the ‘susceptible passions’ of the Prince, and thus ‘had just influence enough, by watching her opportunities, to distress those sometimes whom she wished ill’.41
However great Henrietta’s influence over her royal lover, it was the perception of power, rather than the reality of it, that mattered. When she became the mistress of the heir to the throne, her position at court was immediately transformed. In the social and political hierarchy of the royal court, not just in England but across Europe, the position of mistress to the King or Prince was one of considerable prestige. In counselling his son on the best means to gain favour, Lord Chesterfield wrote: ‘There is at all courts a chain which connects the Prince or Minister with the page of the back-stairs or the chambermaid. The King’s wife or mistress has an influence over him; a lover has an influence over her; the chambermaid or valet-de-chambre has an influence over both; and so ad infinitum. You must, therefore, not break a link of that chain by which you climb up to the Prince.’42
The theory that the perception of power alone was enough to enhance Henrietta’s position at court was borne out by events. No sooner had she become the Prince’s mistress than a host of officials, ministers, disaffected politicians and ambitious place-seekers flocked to her apartments. ‘These quotidian visits which His Majesty when Prince was known to bestow upon her, of so many hours in the four-and-twenty, and for so many years together, had made many superficial courtiers conclude that one who possessed so large a portion of his time must have some share of his heart,’ wrote Lord Hervey. ‘This way of reasoning induced many to make their court to her, and choose that channel to recommend themselves to the Prince.’43
Among the most notable were the Duke of Argyll, who was in opposition to Robert Walpole, and his brother Lord Ilay, along with the Duke of Dorset, chief officer of the King’s household, and Sir Spencer Compton. It seemed inconceivable to such men that the Prince would ‘give all his leisure hours to a pretty and agreeable woman who had no weight in his counsels and perhaps as small portion of his person’.44
Lord Chesterfield realised what Lord Hervey chose not to: however much these place-seekers and politicians exaggerated Mrs Howard’s influence, it was the perception that she had the means to grant their request that augmented it. His account proves that she was well aware of this fact too, and used it to her advantage: ‘Her lodgings grew more and more frequented by busy faces, both of men and women. Solicitations surrounded her, which she did not reject, knowing that the opinion of having power often procures power. Nor did she promise to support them, conscious that she had not the power to do it.’45
As the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Henrietta therefore had to perform a rather delicate balancing act. She had to maintain her influential position by listening patiently to the many supplicants for her favour without actually consenting to their requests, and she had to ensure the security of her own appointment in the Princess’s household by serving both master and mistress. If she alienated either, her position at court would be untenable and she would have no choice but to return to her abusive husband. The stakes had never been higher.
However, there was also the added complication of having to ensure that the Prince never suspected she was using her position as mistress to gain influence over him. The necessity of this had already been proved by an incident concerning her friend Lord Chesterfield, who had sought Caroline’s intervention in order to secure a ‘trifling favour’ from the Prince. The Princess had agreed to help him, but subsequently forgot about it. When, a few days later, she remembered her promise, she summoned the Earl and apologised for her oversight, assuring him that she would speak to her husband that very day. But Chesterfield replied that she should not trouble herself because Mrs Howard had already performed the task. Indignant at this slight, Caroline promptly told the Prince that he had been unwittingly manipulated by his mistress, knowing that he would be ‘very unwilling to have it supposed that the favourite interfered’. George reacted just as she had hoped, flying into a rage and refusing to see Henrietta for several days. Chesterfield, meanwhile, was obliged to stay away from court until the Prince’s anger had subsided.46
The difficult and volatile circumstances that had to be navigated in order to retain her position at court would have defeated a less careful and astute mistress. But Henrietta proved herself equal to the task. By 1720, two years after her affair with the Prince had begun, she was still referred to as ‘a great favoret of Pluto’s [the Prince], & consequently of our Queens [Princess]’.47 Furthermore, even though she had failed to progress the vast majority of applications for the Prince’s favour, she was still besieged by persons of influence – and those who aspired to be so.
Despite her success, Henrietta was growing increasingly restless at court. The skilful manipulation and deception that was required to maintain her position did not come naturally to one who preferred neutrality to faction and intellectual pursuits to political power games. She had also recently lost two of her closest companions at court. Molly Lepel had succumbed to the charms of Lord Hervey and had moved to his country estate in Suffolk after their marriage. Mary Bellenden had also left court to get married, and although both women corresponded frequently with Henrietta, it was a poor substitute for having them close at hand. Indeed, if anything their letters made her even more wistful, as they told of the domestic bliss and tranquillity of their new lives in the country.
Above all, though, Henrietta missed her son. Almost three years had passed since she had seen him, and despite enquiring after him on numerous occasions, she had been able to glean precious little news. Her cousin, Margaret Bradshaw, found out that he had spent some time at a school near Salisbury, and applied to the master there to see the young boy. She told Henrietta: ‘I have sent ten times to Doctor Dunsters to inquire after your Child & could never be inform’d tell this minute yt he was gon from thence’, and assured her that if she had managed to see him, she would have ‘fill’d his bely sum times with frute & tea’.48
It must have been a torment for Henrietta to know that her husband was in all probability raising their son to despise his absent mother. Urged on by her friends, she even contemplated snatching him from his school. But she was painfully aware that her position at court remained tenuous and that she could offer none of the security that the boy needed. As mistress to the Prince of Wales, she also had to be careful not to risk what would inevitably be a very public scandal, given Charles Howard’s temperament. She therefore clung to the hope that Henry would one day return to her of his own free will. She confided this to Mary Bellenden, now Mrs Campbell: ‘nor will I have any sinister methods made use of, but leave all to his Natural Inclinations forbidding all arbitrary Proceeding’.49
The desire to see her son drove Henrietta to risk the Prince’s wrath by trying to persuade him to make peace with his father. At least then she might be permitted to visit Henry at St James’s, whereas since the royal feud, that palace had been strictly off limits for members of the Prince’s court. For once, she and the Princess were of one accord. Caroline also missed her children, and although the King had allowed her to visit them at Kensington, he was clearly determined to exercise strict control over their upbringing. He even referred the matter to the King’s Bench, proposing that he should be responsible for the children’s education and that they should be ‘entirely under his command’.52
The chances of the King and Prince making peace seemed remote. ‘Any persons that are turned out of doors at St James’s are sure to find entertainment at Leicester Fields, so that the happy reconciliation is as near as ever,’ wrote the Earl of Oxford to his wife in May 1718. The King’s resentment towards his son was not to be dispelled so easily. It had been growing in intensity ever since the quarrel at the christening, fuelled by reports that reached him of the brilliance and popularity of the Prince’s court, which to George I was a clear demonstration of impenitent rebellion. It was rumoured that at one stage he even contemplated seizing his son and conveying him to South America, ‘whence he should never be heard of more’.51
Eventually, worn down by the pleadings of his wife and mistress, and grudgingly accepting the logic of Walpole’s arguments about the damage that the ongoing feud was doing to the Hanoverians’ public image, the Prince reluctantly agreed to offer an olive branch. On St George’s Day, 23 April 1720, he wrote a conciliatory letter to the King. Upon receipt of this, his father sent word that he would receive him at St James’s. Mrs Wake, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, encountered the Prince on his way to the palace and was so shocked by his grim countenance that she stopped him and asked if he had heard some terrible news about one of his children. ‘No,’ he sourly replied, ‘I am going to wait upon my Father.’52
The pair met in the King’s closet at St James’s. The Prince managed to put on a reasonable show of contrition, but as he knelt before his father and vowed that he hoped never again to invoke his displeasure, the words must have all but choked him. The King turned pale and was ‘much dismayed’ at the sight of his son’s apparent humility. Onlookers noted that he ‘could not speak to be heard but by broken sentences, and said several times, “Votre conduite, votre conduite”’. The Prince promptly turned on his heel and hastened back to Leicester House. The whole encounter had not lasted above five minutes.53
The reconciliation, however fragile, sparked great celebrations throughout both courts. All those who had been obliged to resign their places because their spouse was in the opposing camp now faced the prospect of a return to service. Lady Cowper recalled that the square in front of Leicester House was ‘full of coaches’ and ‘the Rooms full of Company; everything was gay and laughing; nothing but kissing and wishing of joy; and, in short, so different a face of things, nobody could conceive that so much joy should be after so many resolutions never come to this’.54
Elizabeth Molesworth, an acquaintance of Henrietta, congratulated her upon the part she had played in all this. ‘I suppose you have had no small share in the joy this happy reconciliation has occasioned,’ she wrote. The rejoicing spread throughout the country, although most used it merely as an excuse for overindulgence. Mrs Molesworth admitted that her husband had ‘celebrated the news in a manner that allarmed the country people’, adding that he was ‘att present a little Disordered with that nights work’.55
The reconciliation was ‘so little cordial’, however, that it made precious little difference to relations between the King and Prince.56 The former would not hear of the royal couple returning to live at St James’s – not that his son had any intention of doing so. When the pair met at formal court occasions, as they were now regularly obliged to do, the atmosphere between them chilled the temperature in the room by several degrees. At the first drawing room to be held after the ceasefire, the King and his son stayed at opposite ends of the room with their respective entourages, ‘which made the whole thing look like two armies drawn up in battle Array’, observed one courtier present. They exchanged angry glances all evening, each ready to pounce at the slightest provocation. The same courtier noted: ‘one could not help thinking it was like a little Dog and a Cat – whenever the dog stirs a foot, the cat sets up her back, and is ready to fly at him’.57
Relations were no better a few weeks later. A court newsletter described an encounter between George and his son at another reception. The King ‘spoke not one word to him, good, bad, or indifferent’. The Prince, meanwhile, deliberately slighted the Duke of Newcastle by standing in his way and refusing to speak to him.58
Celebrations among the royal household staff and government officials therefore proved short-lived. If anything, the atmosphere at court was even worse than it had been before the split, and many wished for a return to the days when the two households had been completely separate. Those who had tried to curry favour with both sides during the breach now found themselves out in the cold.
Neither did the reconciliation bring happier times for Henrietta. Charles continued to refuse her access to their son, on which point he had the King’s backing. Furthermore, she found herself the mistress of an increasingly bad-tempered and petulant Prince. The restlessness that she had begun to feel a few months before now turned into a desperate yearning to be free from the shackles of court.