Royal Favourite

Freed from the company of her husband and the drab confines of George I’s court, Henrietta Howard flourished in her new life. She followed her own path just as Melusine had in Hanover, and she avoided intrigue and factionalism, instead remaining as neutral as possible. Henrietta, the Swiss, had perfected her poker face whilst enduring years of miserable married life, when an implacable public façade had been all she could cling onto. As those around Henrietta jostled for power, it was her steady calmness that made her an ideal member of Caroline’s household. Not only was she trustworthy, well-bred and a perfectly proper society hostess, but she was also quick-witted and intelligent, two qualities that were highly valued amongst courtiers.

One man who noticed all of Henrietta’s considerable qualities was George Augustus, the popular and sociable Prince of Wales. Given how indelibly she has since become associated with him, it might come as a surprise to learn that Henrietta wasn’t at the top of George Augustus’ wish list. That dubious honour belonged to her friend and fellow Woman of the Bedchamber, Mary Bellenden.

Mary was considered one of the great beauties of the court and Horace Walpole recorded “that I never heard her mentioned afterwards by one of her contemporaries who did not prefer her as the most perfect creature they ever knew”119. She was light-hearted and witty, and an ornament to Leicester House. She was also just the sort of woman that the Prince of Wales fancied for a mistress. But Mary Bellenden had other ideas. She had already fallen for her future husband, Colonel John Campbell, and she had no wish to miss out on the chance of happiness with him for the precarious role of the prince’s mistress. But George Augustus was used to getting his own way and he had set his sights on Mary. For the money-loving Prince of Wales, the obvious key to her seduction was his bank balance.

Horace Walpole mischievously recalled an evening when George Augustus took a seat beside Mary Bellenden, took out his purse and emptied it onto a table. Then, with great show and affectation, he began to loudly count out his money. Once he had finished counting, he repeated the show, each movement more pronounced than the last. If George Augustus thought this would be irresistible, he had badly misjudged Mary. After a little while she could stand it no longer and shrieked, “Sir, I cannot bear it: if you count your money any more, I will go out of the room!”120 Despite her outburst, George Augustus displayed all the sensitivity customary of the gentlemen from Hanover and at a drawing room a few days later, the purse came out again. Blind to the absurdity of his actions, George Augustus went through the entire rigmarole all over again, emptying the coins and beginning to laboriously count each one in the presence of Mary Bellenden. This time Mary was more cunning and instead of asking him to stop, she accidentally knocked the piles of cash all over the floor. George Augustus, who was so miserly that he had once employed a page to lift up floorboards to find a single lost coin, quickly dropped to his knees to retrieve the scattered money and Mary used the diversion to escape. As Walpole wryly concluded, “the chink of the gold did not tempt her more than the person of his Royal Highness.”121

George Augustus tried everything in his power to coax Mary into his arms, but she was set on Colonel Campbell. She took to displays of sullen disinterest whenever the prince was around and was so blatant that he took her to task for it. In a letter sent to Henrietta, Mary wrote that George Augustus asked her to tell a new lady-in-waiting that she should avoid certain behaviours, including “crossing her arms, as I did to the Prince, and [I] told him I was not cold, but I liked to stand so.”122 When all his efforts to seduce Mary failed, George Augustus became determined to discover who his rival for her affections was. The prince promised Mary that she and her love would both be favoured at court if they promised not to marry without first receiving his permission. Mary gave her word that she wouldn’t marry without letting George Augustus know, but refused to give him Campbell’s name. When George Augustus learned that Mary had secretly married Campbell in 1720, he never forgave her. Every time he and Mary met after that, he reminded her sternly that she had broken her promise. George Augustus knew how to bear a grudge just as well as his father did.

With Mary Bellenden making her disinterest in the attentions of the Prince of Wales so unquestionably obvious, the field was clear for another candidate to try her luck. Henrietta’s steady and calm manner had won her many friends and now George Augustus took to visiting her to pour out his heart, perhaps even to lament the loss of Mary Bellenden. He found Henrietta happy to provide a shoulder to cry on. She was already beginning to experience the fearsome headaches and hearing loss that would eventually leave her totally deaf, but she didn’t let any of that dampen her pleasant nature. Pope, who adored Henrietta, was determined to turn her loss of hearing into something to be celebrated. He wrote:

Has she no faults, then (Envy says), sir?

Yes, she has one, I must aver:

When all the world conspire to praise her,

The woman’s deaf, and will not hear.”

Despite his determination to find a mistress, George Augustus remained devoted to his wife, Caroline, and she to him in a way that George I and Sophia Dorothea had never been. Yet royal mistresses were part of what kept the court wheels turning and Caroline accepted that it was simply the done thing, though she much preferred that her husband choose someone familiar to fill the role. With George Augustus acquiring a growing reputation as a man who was ruled by his forceful wife, he hoped that the presence of a mistress would serve as proof to court and parliament alike that he was in charge of his own affairs.

Exactly when and how George Augustus and Henrietta Howard became lovers remains open to conjecture. It seems unlikely that she set out to secure the role in a calculated manner, particularly given her earlier musings on the sanctity of her marriage vows, but neither should we see Henrietta as an innocent who was preyed upon by a lustful prince. It’s more likely that the affair was born out of familiarity and friendship.George Augustus liked to spend hours in Henrietta’s quarters in the company of Mary and Henrietta, attempting to win Mary’s affections whilst her friend played chaperone and third wheel. When Mary married and gave up her place at court in 1720, the meetings in Henrietta’s rooms continued. This time, there were only two in attendance.

During the nightly audiences between Henrietta and George Augustus, who was six years her senior, the pair eventually came to an understanding. Horace Walpole famously did not “suppose that love had any share in the sacrifice she made of her virtue”123 but rather imagined that Henrietta’s capitulation came about because she “had felt poverty, and was far from disliking power.”124 Power, however, was something that would remain forever outside of her grasp. George Augustus had watched his father listen to the sometimes-errant advice of Melusine and had no wish for a mistress to become his advisor. That role belonged to his wife, Caroline of Ansbach.

Henrietta sought security rather than power after her unsettled childhood and poverty-stricken marriage. Her liaison with George Augustus provided security in spades, as well as a handsome allowance from her protector. She received £2,000 per year when he was prince, and this soared to an eyewatering £3,200 once he became king. That she achieved all this without incurring enemies and “from the propriety and decency of her behaviour was always treated as if her virtue had never been questioned,”125 is testament to Henrietta’s easy nature as she presided over the so-called Swiss cantons. Even after she retired, Henrietta continued to bank a pension of £2,000 per annum until George II died. Not that Henrietta shirked from performing that favourite pastime of the royal mistress – acquiring favours. It should come as no surprise that her brother, John, steadily climbed the ranks at court once she became George Augustus’ mistress126. He would remain one of her closest friends.

Jonathan Swift, who had so savagely skewered Melusine when he had branded her a whore in his A Wicked Treasonable Libel, was a little kinder to Henrietta than to her fellow royal mistress. She was above all things a courtier, he decided, wielding the word like a weapon. To be a consummate courtier was far from a good thing, and Swift was sure that none was better at the game than Henrietta Howard.

“From the attendance duly paid her by all the ministers,” Swift wrote, “as well as others who expect advancement, she hath been reckoned for some years to be the great favourite of the court at Leicester-fields, which is a fact that of all others she most earnestly wishes might not be believed.”127 It wasn’t that Henrietta attempted to hide her position as favourite though, more that it wasn’t in her retiring nature to capitalise on it as richly as others might have been tempted to do. Yet even Swift couldn’t bring himself to level his sights at Henrietta as mercilessly as he had Melusine. “In all offices of life, except that of a courtier,” he allowed, “she acts with justice, generosity, and truth; she is ready to do good as a private person [and] she will not do hurt as a courtier, unless it be to those who deserve it.”128

For many years Swift adored Henrietta despite his criticisms and they exchanged regular letters, sharing stories and jokes and just a hint of affection. Theirs was certainly no love affair, but they were well-matched intellectually. He teased her endlessly, revelling in her attention and that of her mistress, both of whom were immeasurably fond of him. When Swift claimed that “there is no politician who […] can form a language with more imperceptible dexterity to the present situation of the court, or more early foresee what style may be proper upon any approaching juncture of affairs, whereof she can gather timely intelligence without asking it, and often when those from whom she receives it do not know that they are giving it to her,”129 however, he was mistaken. Henrietta was far from a gifted politician. In that regard, she was certainly inferior to the Princess of Wales.

Quite apart from influence and advancement, Henrietta had been glad of the opportunity that the Prince and Princess of Wales’ departure from St James’s Palace had given her to escape. She had the protection of royal favour and if she was to become the mistress of George Augustus, then that protection would become virtually ironclad. In this, she and Melusine were not so different. Both had joined the royal court as a means of finding a place to settle after precarious early years during which they had been forced to grow up quickly. As mistresses to a king and his heir respectively, they would finally achieve something approaching security. Though there’s little doubt in my mind that Melusine and George I did love one another, how much love existed between Henrietta and George Augustus is a matter of debate. Royal marriages and royal mistresses shared one thing in common: they were often a matter of business before pleasure. Likewise, we should be careful not to view their attachment through the moral prism of Henrietta cuckolding her employer, Caroline of Ansbach, with George Augustus. In fact, the Princess of Wales far preferred that George Augustus take a mistress who she not only knew well, but actually had authority over. Years later, when George Augustus tired of Henrietta and sought a younger candidate who wasn’t from within Caroline’s inner circle, she was unsettled. By then a queen, Caroline became determined to ensure that Henrietta retained her position as George Augustus’maîtresse-en-titre against everyone’s better wishes.

The waspish and spiky Baron Hervey, who Henrietta certainly couldn’t count among her champions, lamented what he saw as an ill-matched couple. Indeed, he might almost have been speaking of Charles Howard too when he wrote of Henrietta and George Augustus:

“She was civil to everybody, friendly to many, and unjust to none: in short, she had a good head and a good heart, but had to do with a man who was incapable of tasting the one or valuing the other.”130

The liaison between George Augustus and Henrietta does not seem to have been the most passionate, it must be said. The prince made his nightly visits to her chambers just as his father did to Melusine’s rooms, and there he and Henrietta passed a few hours in private. He would arrive at her door every evening on the dot of nine and was so slavishly devoted to routine that he paced his own rooms until the very minute of their meeting arrived. He was keen to see her, but not so keen that he didn’t stick rigidly to his timetable.

Though there have been historical accounts that claim the relationship between the prince and Henrietta was never more than platonic, few today would agree with that supposition. George Augustus wasn’t the most cerebral man in the world but was instead hot-tempered and had a penchant for tantrums, kicking his wigs and stamping his feet when things didn’t go his way. He loved the company of women, none more so than his wife, and there were plenty of young ladies at court who would have happily shared his bed. To think that he spent a few hours each evening discussing matters of note with Henrietta is simply not plausible. He preferred to do that with his wife.

Henrietta was not a showy mistress. Instead she downplayed her position, remaining as neutral and self-contained as ever. Yet the fact that she had the ear of the heir to the throne could not go unnoticed. Soon, “the busy and speculative politicians of the anti-chambers [sic], who know everything, but know everything wrong, naturally concluded, that a lady with whom the King passed so many hours every day must necessarily have some interest with him, and consequently applied to her”131.

Caroline had allied herself with Robert Walpole, who she had come to trust after he had engineered the reconciliation between her husband and his father. Walpole’s opponents knew they had no hope of influence with the Princess of Wales, so they made the prince’s mistress their target instead. It was a wasted effort for the most part and when George Augustus succeeded to the throne, poems and ballads mocked his reliance on his shrewd and politically intelligent wife with verses that savaged the monarch and his family.

“You may strut, dapper George, but ‘twill all be in vain; We all know ‘tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign – You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain. Then if you would have us fall down and adore you, Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.”

There was a good portion of truth in the jesting. Robert Walpole spotted early on that advancement and favour lay in the hands not of the mistress, but of the wife. For that wife, meanwhile, power became the bluntest instrument she possessed.

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