The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Elizabeth’s one consolation was her belief in a Christian heaven. ‘We believe the immortality of the soul, then she is happy, and we mourn for ourselves, in this terrible loss we should consider that the delay of that bliss she is in, would have been a delay to the felicity that she now enjoys.’

  Very little correspondence survives about Elizabeth as a mother or grandmother, but the letters surrounding the death of Harriet and the descriptions of contemporaries give the impression of a caring, nurturing mother, devoted to her family. Even Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, temporarily abandoned her critical tone to declare that she ‘has bred up her children very well’.6 After Harriet’s death, Orkney beseeched her widower to ‘let somebody let us know from time to time how you are in your health [and] your little ones are all in perfect health.’7 Elizabeth meanwhile stressed that she still considered John to be close family, beginning her letter with ‘My Lord, and dear son, for I must ever call you by that tender name.’

  Harriet’s death took a serious toll on Elizabeth, and when her health began to falter, she was taken to the Orkneys’ London residence, located in Albemarle Street, which was so often blocked with carriages that it would later become the first one-way street in the capital. On 19 April 1733 Elizabeth Villiers, who hated the noise and filth of the metropolis, died in a house on its most congested thoroughfare. The ‘wisest woman’ Jonathan Swift ever met outlived her daughter by a painful seven months. Six days later, she was buried with minimal fuss at Taplow. It was an understated end to a remarkable life filled with scandal, political intrigue, romance and maternal love. Elizabeth had turned the rules of society on their head. She was not a beauty, but she captured the heart of a king; she was an abominable speller, yet captivated the foremost minds of her day; and she was a royal whore who had come to host royalty on her own terms.

  Under Elizabeth’s guidance, Cliveden had become a family home as much as an informal political salon. She brought a sophisticated and worldly touch to the house, setting the tone for centuries to come. The Earl of Orkney outlived his wife by four years. Three weeks before his death he was appointed England’s first Field Marshal of ‘all his majesties forces.’ He was buried in the family vault in the grounds of Taplow Court in a simple funeral without pomp or ceremony.

  PART III

  AUGUSTA

  1719–1772

  Chapter 1

  ‘RULE, BRITANNIA!’

  CLIVEDEN, 1 AUGUST 1740

  AUGUSTA, PRINCESS OF Wales, the new chatelaine of Cliveden, made her way with languorous grace along a pathway through the garden. Two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on the 20-year-old princess and her husband, Frederick, Prince of Wales, as they took their place in the theatre that had been built for the evening’s entertainments. As the sun went down, 100 lanterns were lit to illuminate the stage, and 50 uniformed boys, their heads covered with grenadier caps, appeared with large wax torches; the white candles were brilliant set against the cerulean blue of their costumes.1 Most striking of all was the princess herself – her golden hair, tightly curled and swept away from her face, was adorned with a sculptural arrangement of white feathers; her pale primrose silk gown was decorated with whimsical floral embroidery.

  The air was thick with the heady scent of roses, honeysuckle and jasmine, and an even more potent aura of anticipation. This evening was the premiere of Alfred, a masque with a score by the popular composer Thomas Arne and libretto by the Scottish dramatists David Mallet and James Thomson. The day of the performance had been chosen carefully: the first of August was both the third birthday of the royal couple’s eldest child, Augusta, and the anniversary of the accession of George I, Frederick’s beloved grandfather.

  The masque was not just an opportunity for the heir to the throne and his wife to showcase their Thames-side estate; it was an event freighted with political and social significance. Notably absent were the prince’s parents, King George II and Queen Caroline, with whom Frederick had officially severed ties three years previously. The very public antipathy between the two generations of Hanoverians had spawned two rival courts; those in attendance at Cliveden had pledged their allegiance to Frederick. Around the royal couple was gathered a collection of the nation’s most influential political figures: Sir Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, the Grenville brothers and the future prime minister William Pitt, all swathed in their ceremonial finery.2

  It is likely that the audience also included the writer and politician Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who was something of a political mentor to the Prince of Wales, and a leading theorist of the opposition parliamentary group with which the prince was deeply involved. Two years before, in 1738, Bolingbroke had published his polemic The Idea of a Patriot King, in which he envisioned a monarch who would end the tyranny and oppression that, according to the opposition, had taken hold during the reign of George II. He dedicated the work to Frederick. Bolingbroke had also written an accompanying history of medieval Britain, in which he portrayed the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred – the titular character of Arne’s masque – as the embodiment of freedom and liberty. Alfred, Bolingbroke claimed, was responsible for the creation of a strong navy, the defeat of the Vikings, and the establishment of trial by jury: as such, he was an icon for ‘Free Britons’.

  Frederick strongly identified with Alfred, or at least with Bolingbroke’s version of him, and believed it was his mission as a king-in-waiting to become the 18th century’s own ‘Guardian of Liberty’. His rival court at Cliveden styled itself as a dynamic and patriotic counterpoint to the autocratic, old-fashioned style of George II. The king was a divisive character, quick to anger and obsessed with protocol. Though his reign saw both growing stability at home and the expansion of British interests abroad, George was widely regarded as neglectful of his people and little more than the puppet of his ministers.

  Frederick, by contrast, expended a significant amount of energy portraying himself as a monarch who would rule as well as reign. Alfred was, in effect, his manifesto, an evocative mission statement for kingship, set to music. It was intended to reinforce his image as a custodian of English liberty.3 The premiere of the masque at Frederick’s Cliveden ‘court’ came at a crucial moment for the prince and his allies. The need for unity among the opposition was particularly pressing in August 1740 because of the deaths of two of their number, William Wyndham and the Earl of Marchmont.4 With elections looming the following year, the performance of Alfred was the ideal opportunity to powerfully restate the opposition’s core political tenets – a reduced army; a strong navy; a commitment to trade; and the preservation of English liberty, maintained by a balanced constitution of king, Lords and Commons.

  The masque form, with its dazzling combination of poetry, music, dancing, acting, allegory and audience participation, was perfect for the prince’s purposes in Alfred, which needed to be a spectacle befitting a king-in-waiting and his assembled court. The calibre of the entertainers, who were all brought in from the Drury Lane Theatre, reflected the importance of the occasion. William Milward, a popular actor on the London theatre scene, played Alfred, while the noted actress Kitty Clive took the part of the shepherdess Emma. The famed tenor Thomas Salway would have the onerous responsibility of singing the closing number, the soon-to-be-famous ‘Rule, Britannia!’5 For maximum impact Frederick had positioned the stage within Bridgeman’s amphitheatre so that his guests could take full advantage of the views of the river while still remaining close to the comforts of the house. The Thames was the cradle of British naval strength and, as a backdrop to the masque, it became a shimmering prop in what Frederick hoped would be a public-relations coup.

  At the time of the performance, Frederick and Augusta had been spending summers at Cliveden for nearly three years. The prince had first visited the property in 1729 as a guest of the Orkneys and was immediately struck by the splendour of the place.6 His other residence at Kew was only a mile away from the royal palace at Richmond, but Cliveden perfectly suited Frederick’s desire to live at a
greater distance from his parents while remaining close to the centres of royal power. After the Earl of Orkney’s death in January 1737, the house had passed to Elizabeth and Orkney’s elder surviving daughter, Anne, whose husband, William O’Brien, 4th Earl of Inchiquin, was an ardent supporter and close friend of Frederick’s. It was quickly agreed that Anne and William would reside primarily at Taplow Court and lease Cliveden to the prince. Quarterly rent payments of £150 began in 1738 but, according to reports in the London press and household bills, the couple was already establishing their household at Cliveden in 1737.7 For the next 14 years, they would use Cliveden as their summer residence.

  An invitation, designed by William Hogarth, to a production of Alfred. Thomas Arne’s opera is remembered chiefly for its finale, ‘Rule, Britannia!’

  It is easy to imagine the pride both Anna Maria and Elizabeth, those two former chatelaines, would have felt knowing that their country estate was finally in the hands of royalty. Given Elizabeth’s disdain for courtly formality, she would not only have been impressed by the flamboyance of the production, but also highly amused by the more raucous elements of the evening: according to Jemima, Marchioness Grey, ‘all the Common People were admitted, and were with most of the Performers made exceedingly Drunk.’8

  Arne’s masque followed King Alfred in his mighty conflict with nefarious foreign enemies. After losing a crucial battle, Alfred takes refuge on an island off the Somerset coast. During his exile, his resolve begins to falter, but his morale is roused by the spirits of three of his most glorious descendants, who are conjured up for him by a clairvoyant hermit. These royal phantoms – Edward, the Black Prince; Elizabeth I; and William III – rally Alfred and inspire him with a sense of his country’s destiny. Re-energised and gripped by patriotic fervour, Alfred vows to protect his country from foreign oppressors. The narrative of the masque was absurdly fantastical but its message abundantly clear: England was in need of a new patriot king.

  At the end of the drama, Salway took centre stage and performed the final song, climbing towards the now-famous chorus:

  When Britain first, at heaven’s command,

  Arose from out the azure main,

  This was the charter of the land,

  And guardian angels sang this strain:

  ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

  Britons never will be slaves.’

  ‘Rule Britannia!’ was an instant hit and soon became popular as a song independent from the rest of the masque. It was performed as a stand-alone piece in theatrical entertainments and quoted by Handel in his 1746 Occasional Oratorio. Wagner would later claim that the first eight notes embodied the whole character of the British nation.9 In the Victorian period, the lyric of the chorus came to be sung with an ‘s’ on the end of ‘rule’, turning the song into a celebration of empire (‘Britannia Rules the Waves!’) rather than an exhortation to naval strength, as was intended by the original imperative, ‘rule’.

  In the context of the later success of ‘Rule Britannia!’ it is easy to forget that in 1740 the song had a very specific political relevance. In October 1739, Britain had declared war on Spain, in what became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, named after the incident that triggered it – the captain of a Spanish patrol boat cutting off the ear of the British captain Robert Jenkins. The Country Party – as Frederick’s loose opposition alliance of Tories and disaffected Whigs was commonly known, the name appropriated from the Duke of Buckingham’s era as a claim to represent the interests of the whole nation and not just those of the metropolitan court – was in favour of declaring war on Spain in retaliation for this act of aggression. The defence of Britain by sea was a core policy of the opposition, who infinitely preferred a strong navy to George II’s large standing army because the latter was so closely associated with repression and tyranny.

  The war with Spain, which would be predominately a naval war fought in the colonies, sat well with this cause. It also provided yet another potent connection to King Alfred, who had become particularly associated with sea power, as he was thought, not without foundation, to have been the first native king to build a significant war fleet. At the end of the masque, after the famous finale, the oracular hermit both encourages and foresees British naval dominion:

  I see thy commerce, Britain, grasp the world,

  All nations serve thee, every foreign flood,

  Subjected, pays its tribute to the Thames …

  Britons proceed, the subject deep command,

  Awe with your navies every hostile land:

  In vain their threats, their armies all in vain,

  They rule the balanc’d world who rule the main.

  The staging of Alfred at Frederick’s Cliveden court thus made a powerful political statement. But the six hours of entertainment did not end there. Frederick had invited the noted Venetian ballerina Barbara Campanini (known by the theatre-going public as ‘Barbarina’ or ‘Barbarini’) to perform.10 In 1739 she had made a great impression in Paris with an original, comic style of mime that drew on her Italian training. ‘She jumps very high, has big legs, yet dances with precision. Although lanky, she does not lack grace… It is thought that her dance is inimitable,’ observed the Marquis d’Argenson, who went to see her perform in Paris.11 At Cliveden, seating was erected at the end of an illuminated path along which Barbarina cartwheeled, jumped and pirouetted with preternatural finesse; the Prince of Wales, Augusta, and their children sat on chairs at the front of the audience.12

  The proceedings concluded with a spectacular display of fireworks, which were designed by the experimental scientist John Theophilus Desaguliers, and pronounced by the newspapers to be ‘equal in their kind to the rest of the Performance’.13 Desaguliers had long been a favourite in the royal household: he had been commissioned to perform several scientific demonstrations at Hampton Court by George I and had dedicated his book, A Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), to Frederick, who also employed him as a chaplain.14 That a scientist, who was at the cutting edge of 18th-century thinking, would be employed to design a fireworks display is testament to the expansiveness of contemporary scientific curiosity; the pyrotechnics were a visual manifestation of scientific knowledge and national pride.

  Augusta’s husband Frederick, Prince of Wales, a patron of the arts and of opposition politics.

  Frederick and Augusta were so delighted that they requested that the whole entertainment be performed again the following night. This time, the weather was not so forgiving and, halfway through, the heavens opened. Undeterred, the couple insisted that the production be relocated to the house. The guests were ushered inside and Arne’s band followed, taking up their trumpets, fiddles, oboes and brass, and trooping indoors with as much haste as possible. Though the audience was no longer able to enjoy the sweet-smelling theatre, they could still admire the view of the Thames, now shrouded in rain, from the back of the house. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ was sung once again and this time everybody joined in for the chorus.15

  The newspapers greedily took the bait. ‘The whole was conducted with the utmost Magnificence and Decorum,’ raved the General Evening Post on 2 August; the London Daily Post and London Evening Post devoted many column inches to effusive descriptions of all the entertainments. Alfred had been an indisputable success. Frederick had showcased himself to glorious effect as a worthy future king, while Augusta had radiated the charm of a natural born queen. Cliveden had provided the perfect setting to consolidate the credentials of Britain’s golden couple.

  Chapter 2

  RISE

  AUGUSTA’S LIFE HAD unfolded like an 18th-century version of the Cinderella story. She was born in 1719 to Magdalena Augusta of Anhalt-Zerbst and Friedrich II, ruler of the ducal court of Saxe-Gotha in Thuringia, Germany. Though the palace in which she grew up, the baroque Schloss Friedenstein, was undoubtedly grand, her father’s court was of negligible importance in European politics, and as her parents’ 13th child, her chances of marrying into a more power
ful family were remote. Her eldest sister wed Johann Adolf, duke of the neighbouring Saxe-Weissenfels, and the best Augusta could have realistically hoped for was a similar match to a local ruler. In 1732, after the death of her father, she moved with her mother to a new suburban palace, where she lived a comfortable but unremarkable life.

  Providence intervened in 1735 when George II, on a trip to his nearby electorate, Hanover, asked to meet with Augusta. He was looking for a suitable match for his wayward son, the heir to the British throne, Frederick, Prince of Wales. From their first encounter, the king was entranced by the 17-year-old German ingénue. Augusta’s appearance was ‘modest and good-natured’, and George believed she had the potential to make a royal bride.1 She had a fine head of fair hair, which the acerbic Queen Caroline harshly described as ‘a sort of blond sheep’s colour’, luminous blue eyes, a slight figure, and a sweet, shy smile; not unusually for the time, her cheeks bore the scars of smallpox.2 George was flattered by her deferential manner, impressed with her good sense and charmed by her innocence. In Augusta he had found an ideal partner for his son, someone who, he believed, would curb Frederick’s appetite for the high life and keep him on the straight and narrow.3 Augusta’s mother and her brother, Friedrich III, eagerly approved the match, but failed to give her any practical advice in the weeks before her voyage to England. She did not even learn any of the language, having gathered the mistaken impression that following two decades of Hanoverian monarchs, most of the British court would speak German.4