As a Woman of the Bedchamber, Henrietta Howard was ostensibly the lady whose job it was to help the Princess of Wales with her toilette routine. For years Henrietta had carried out her duties without complaint but now that her servant was sharing her favours with George Augustus, Caroline’s love of protocol went into overdrive. She tightened Henrietta’s leash.
Perhaps the one incident that demonstrates more than ever the uncomfortable dichotomy of Henrietta’s dual roles comes in a story that Baron Hervey related of a clash between wife and mistress. By rights, Henrietta was required to hold the basin from which Caroline washed each morning, and she was supposed to kneel whilst doing so. Though this might not seem like the most arduous of tasks, the queen’s washing regime wasn’t exactly quick, nor was it particularly ceremonial. Instead, Henrietta knelt with the basin in her hands as Caroline washed wherever she felt needed cleaning, including picking out her teeth and flicking the detritus into the basin that Henrietta held. So much for royal glamour.
Caroline, who had been so friendly for so long towards her servant, suddenly and quite unexpectedly decided that every ceremony must now be followed to the letter. Sensing that her mistress’ change of behaviour was dictated not by protocol but by jealousy, Henrietta allowed herself a rare moment of rebellion. To Caroline, who shared the story with Baron Hervey, it was simply a source of spiteful amusement. Henrietta could rebel all she liked, but ultimately, both knew that she was powerless.
“[Henrietta dared] to pick a quarrel with me about holding a basin in the ceremony of my dressing, and to tell me, with her little fierce eyes, and cheeks as red as your coat, that positively she would not do it; to which I made her no answer then in anger, but calmly, as I would have said to a naughty child, “Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will. Go, go! Fa for shame! Go, my good Howard; we will talk of this another time.”
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; 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, when 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 through my fingers thus.”132
And so it was to continue for Henrietta, who could do nothing but take her mistreatment on the chin unless she wanted to run the risk of being thrown out of her job. She couldn’t expect anything in the way of support from George Augustus either. Were he ever to be called upon to decide between his wife and his mistress, there was only one way he would jump. Horace Walpole recalled that after George Augustus’ succession to the throne, he and Caroline continued to use Henrietta in a humiliating manner, upbraiding her for being jealous and threatening her with the sack if she dared to answer back. George Augustus was no courtly lover, and he was not above turning on his mistress to impress his wife either. On one occasion as Henrietta was dressing the queen, George Augustus burst into the room and snatched a kerchief from Caroline’s neck. He rounded furiously on Henrietta and bellowed, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen’s!”. How that barb must have stung.
George Augustus was entirely reliant on Caroline in many matters and sought absolution from his extramarital conquests by making sure that they received the approval of his wife. Whenever George Augustus fell for a woman, he made sure to tell Caroline all about her in the most elaborate and lurid detail. His letters ran to dozens of pages and described in painstaking detail the woman he was pursuing. He catalogued her best and worst qualities and culminated in a detailed commentary on the seduction itself. Caroline was his closest advisor in all things, not just matters of national importance.
Though Caroline likely never gave any serious consideration to terminating Henrietta’s appointment, there was always the possibility that she could and that would spell certain catastrophe for Henrietta. Her place at Leicester House protected her from her brutal husband but that place was dependent on remaining in good favour. Of course, it helped that she had been so Swiss in her manner, acquiring few if any enemies along the way, and it helped too that she was never showy in her relationship with George Augustus. If anything, by her quiet nature Henrietta did all she could to ensure that the affair remained as private as was possible in the Georgian court. Even then Caroline liked to occasionally tighten the screws, just to remind her servant who was the boss. Whenever she felt as though Henrietta was getting too popular, either with Walpole’s enemies or George Augustus himself, she would concoct political business to keep her husband busy and away from his mistress. By these small means, she kept her rival in check.
In fact, Caroline really had no need to keep Henrietta in check, because Henrietta was singularly unsuccessful when it came to the political side of her role. Melusine had sold favours and titles to the highest bidder as a matter of routine and had, through some shrewd whispers in the king’s ears, advanced her favourites and kept her enemies mostly at bay. There is considerably less proof of Henrietta having done anything on the same scale. Instead she was a royal mistress in the most basic sense, spending hour after hour with the prince, who could be as sullen and bad-tempered as his father was, always at his beck and call just as she was at that of the princess. Through all of it she must have told herself that it was worth the stultifying boredom of George Augustus’ company to be safe from her husband, but being safe from Charles brought with it separation from her son too.
Henrietta could only imagine what Charles had been telling Henry in the years since she had last seen him, but I think we can guess. He had resolved to make the boy hate his mother and, in becoming mistress to the Prince of Wales, Henrietta had provided her estranged spouse with ample ammunition. No doubt to the impressionable boy she was the scarlet woman, abandoning her child to cosy up to the heir to the throne and reap all the rewards that her new role would bring with it. Henrietta mourned the loss of Henry, so to see the royal couple separated from their children after the move to Leicester House must have brought back miserable memories.
Because of her estrangement from her own son, there were some amongst Henrietta’s circle who believed that she must have had some hand in the reconciliation between the king and the prince. Elizabeth Molesworth, Henrietta’s friend and correspondent, wrote that “I suppose you have had no small share in the joy this happy reconciliation has occasioned”, but in fact Henrietta gained little from it.
Perhaps Henrietta had hoped that the reconciliation of the prince and his father might bring with it the occasional opportunity to visit St James’s Palace and catch the odd glimpse of her son, but it was not to be. When Caroline’s pleas to Robert Walpole and Melusine finally brought about the uneasy peace, it was far from happy families. Though the public rejoiced at the apparent reunion between the royal father and son, in truth it was more of a PR exercise than any real meeting of the minds and the mutual animosity between the king and the prince certainly hadn’t been resolved, only papered over. The courts remained two separate entities, though courtiers could now pass more freely between them, even if the households didn’t come together as one. At drawing rooms and other events, the king and his entourage occupied one side of the room whilst the prince and his circle stuck to the other. There was little true unity. George Augustus remained at Leicester House and summered at Richmond Lodge and so did Henrietta, her son lost to her still. That was one thing that wouldn’t change.