The Howe Dynasty

by Julie Flavell

  The rising generation of Howes well understood that interest must be cultivated at court as well as in Parliament. Toward that end, the Dowager Lady Charlotte Howe would remain Lady of the Bedchamber to Princess Augusta until Augusta’s death in 1772, and she was now supported in royal circles by her son Richard and daughter Caroline. In 1760, Richard Lord Howe joined her in court service when he was appointed Lord of the Bedchamber to the Duke of York, Prince Edward Augustus. The duke was loyal to the man who had commanded him during the dangerous missions off the coast of France in 1758.63 And the appointment was almost certainly welcomed by the duke’s brother, George III, for he liked and admired Richard throughout his life, even acknowledging the blood tie by referring to him as his “Trusty and well Beloved Cousin.”64

  But it is unlikely that Richard’s service was more than ceremonial; he and Prince Edward were too dissimilar to become close companions. One was a family man and the other a notorious rake. Prince Edward had led an unsettled existence since his early buccaneering days off the coast of France with Richard Howe. Despite seeing little more service at sea, he was a rear admiral by the end of the war. Formerly close to his staid brother George III, the Duke of York had become a man-about-town, with a coterie of rakish aristocratic friends and prostitutes. The king disapproved of his behavior, fearing he would tarnish the luster of the royal family.65 Edward’s premature death in 1767, aged only twenty-eight, meant that Richard’s court service would in any case be short-lived.

  A more secure court connection was Caroline Howe’s association with Princess Amelia, aunt of George III. Caroline was never formally in the service of the princess; theirs was a genuine friendship of long standing. Amelia, like the Dowager Lady Howe, had been born in Hanover. Caroline, eleven years younger than the princess, had probably known her since girlhood. There was a sibling quality to the dynamic between the two women, reflected in Caroline’s reference to “the old sisterly jokes” she shared during a visit to the princess.66

  Amelia had never married. She was a rambunctious, un-regal woman who loved riding, hunting, and cardplaying. Loud and sometimes tactless, she drew conflicting reactions from those around her. Horace Walpole found her unfeminine and unattractively self-assured, writing that on one occasion she attended chapel “in riding clothes with a dog under her arm.”67 Yet a lady wrote of her that she was “one of the oddest princesses, that ever was known; she has her ears shut to flattery, and her heart open to honesty. She has honour, justice, good-nature, sense, wit, resolution, and more good qualities than I have time to tell you.”68

  It is not surprising that Caroline, also noted for her plain speaking, cardplaying, and love of the chase, was a regular attendee at Amelia’s levees and parties. Walpole, who also attended them, noted jealously that the princess, “one evening, when I was present, gave [Mrs. Howe] a ring with a small portrait of George I. with a crown of diamonds.” Walpole took this as an acknowledgment of kinship on the part of the princess; he believed that the Dowager Lady Howe was the illegitimate daughter of George I.69

  Walpole could be as jealous as he liked in private. Amelia was a royal princess whose opinions exacted outward deference. If the stories were true, her unmarried state did not prevent her from finding love. She was reckoned when young to be the prettiest of the daughters of George II; she was said to have had affairs with the Duke of Newcastle and with the 2nd Duke of Grafton. The last rumor was probably true—on one occasion, she went out riding alone with Grafton for almost an entire night.70 Horace Walpole suspected that she had borne a daughter by Admiral Lord Rodney.71 She was also whispered to have been the mother of the composer Samuel Arnold, which would have meant an affair with an obscure commoner.72 She was unlikely to have had all these affairs and children, but the point is that she was a royal who provoked gossipy speculation. One thing that does seem certain is that she enjoyed the company of the down-to-earth Caroline Howe, a regular figure in her exclusive circles.

  For Caroline, the greatest change wrought by the end of the war was the resumption of regular family life as her brothers came home. The year after the peace saw Caroline and her husband, John, looking for a house in London. Hitherto, they had stayed with the Dowager Lady Howe in Albemarle Street when they came to town. The Howes, however, did not have a palatial town residence on the scale of the wealthiest aristocracy. Lady Charlotte Howe’s house was small enough that Caroline had to sleep in a camp bed in her younger sister Julie’s room when the family got together—“brim full,” as she described it, “generally 8 or 9 at breakfast.” In the summer of 1764, she and her husband were looking for a property large enough to include a spare room for her brother William.73 This was before Caroline knew of William’s marriage plans. The house in Bolton Row that she and John would rent in 1765 would be their London residence for the next six years.

  Nonetheless, the couple remained rooted in the country. They were part of an aristocratic set that moved continuously throughout the year, from London and its wintertime “season” to the provinces in June. Their itinerary over a four-month period in 1759 was typical: Beginning in August at Bristol, Somersetshire, where John Howe was recovering from a bout of illness, the couple moved on to Harleyford Manor, a modern elegant country house in Buckinghamshire and the home of Caroline’s friend Mary Clayton and Sir William Clayton 1st Baronet and MP. From there, the Howes were the guests of Sir Francis Dashwood at West Wycombe House, also in Buckinghamshire. Caroline was amused by the marble columns and statues, temples and lake, all inspired by Sir Francis’s exotic experiences on the Continent. There were also the Hell-Fire Caves, carved out on the estate as a venue for the notorious club of the same name.74 Next up was “the Race Week,” most probably at Newmarket, which had a regular meeting in October. After a brief stopover at their home in Hanslope, the Howes at the end of October joined the Althorp Hunt in Northamptonshire. By December, Caroline was back in Hanslope, preparing for more travels. They would shortly leave for Battlesden to visit Aunt and Uncle Page, then four or five days in London, then Grantham in Lincolnshire and the Belvoir Hunt with their friend Lord Granby.75

  Life at these country estates followed a similar rhythm, though each great seat was stamped with the personality of its aristocratic host. If there was foxhunting, it began very early and might go on for the entire day. On other days, breakfast was typically served at nine or ten, followed by riding or shooting for the men and walking and visiting for the women. A guest at Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire recalled that breakfast finished at eleven and guests could please themselves until after three, when dinner was served. Outdoor activities normally came to a close by 2 p.m. to allow an hour to dress for what was the most important meal of the day. After dinner, the ladies withdrew and left the gentlemen to drink and talk sports and politics. The custom of separating the sexes in this way was English, and unknown on the Continent. Its origins are obscure, but it was well established by the mid-eighteenth century. Evenings brought the men and women together again and included games, billiards, music, and cardplaying. One aristocratic household might retire to bed by 10 or 11 p.m., while another might carry on into the early hours of the morning. A guest at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire recalled that the night’s revelries ended “as the Housemaids begin to twirl their mops and open the shutters to the sunshine.”76

  It appeared to be a life of continual enjoyment, but Caroline may have felt trapped in what was an unvarying pattern with limited opportunities for change or self-expression. John Howe did not always include her in his excursions. He regularly went away from her for long periods, hunting or visiting. “I believe I shall be of the Party as he does me the honour to admit me,” she wrote with good-humored sarcasm of an impending visit to Althorp to hunt with Lord Spencer in November 1762. John Howe passed Christmastide 1763, when Caroline was forty-one, hunting with friends, leaving her with her mother in Albemarle Street. On another occasion, she wrote in a playful note, “Mr Howe runs away again from me.” This time he was off to “conjure�
� with learned astronomer Matthew Raper. Caroline was often excluded from these visits, despite the fact that her interest in the latest scientific discoveries of the Royal Society equaled that of her husband.77 The reality was that, as a wife in Georgian Britain, she was under the direction of her husband. John Howe—to all appearances a worthy but rather dull character—could limit her engagement with the wider world merely by instructing her to remain at home.

  Being childless no doubt added to the predicament. Her mother, the Dowager Lady Howe, had given birth to ten children, and eight had reached adulthood, but this luck changed with the next generation, when both Caroline and her sister Charlotte failed to produce offspring. The two sisters had plenty of company; a fifth of aristocratic marriages during the century were barren, at a time when producing a male heir was the chief duty of a lady in a dynastic marriage. “All property,” writes one historian without exaggeration, “depended on the chastity of women”; and aristocratic property inherited through the male line was all-dependent on the birth of a legitimate son.78 Unsurprisingly, with this sort of pressure no married woman could escape scrutiny. Typical was the attitude of a society gossip at a social event in the autumn of 1774, who inspected the fashionable newlywed young ladies and pronounced it “extraordinary” that only one appeared to be pregnant.79 The pressure was intense and relentless.

  Caroline herself routinely reported on pregnancies and childbirths in her letters. She was blunt about the fact that boys were the longed-for outcome. “I am sorry the boy has turned into a girl,” she wrote of a false report that a friend had delivered a son. Upon the arrival elsewhere of a baby girl, “[Y]ou will be sorry to hear Lady Weymouth has a fourth daughter.”80 Although she had grown up in the midst of her mother’s fecundity, she had also witnessed the childless marriages of her two aunts, Lady Pembroke and Juliana Page. At the age of forty-one, after more than twenty years of marriage, she found herself in the same unhappy situation.

  It was common to blame the woman in such cases, although scientific opinion of the era was divided. A woman’s barrenness could never absolutely be proven, so a wife who had intercourse with her husband but failed to conceive gave him no grounds for an annulment. Childless marriages could be dissolved, but only if it was proven that the man was impotent.81 The main thing was to keep trying, for anecdotal evidence suggested that there was hope in even the most desperate case. Caroline wrote to an acquaintance about a friend who gave birth at age forty-six. And another, Mrs. Edward Morant, “is going to lye in after having been married many years without any prospect of the kind.”82

  Georgian Britons, even the most refined, were very technical about these matters. A young wife who was not conceiving was criticized if she took herself away from her husband’s bed, even for a short visit. A married couple who disliked one another and lived apart might still make arrangements to have regular intercourse in the interest of producing an heir.83 Caroline’s conspicuous love of riding and foxhunting would certainly have opened her to criticism, because it was widely assumed that excessive physical activity could lead to miscarriage. It would not be surprising if John Howe blamed his younger wife for contributing to their childless state.

  One circumstance suggests that Caroline may have experienced a miscarriage. When the wife of Thomas Villiers, Lord Hyde, miscarried in 1763, the unhappy couple turned to John and Caroline Howe for sympathy. “Mr Howe has given up a few days hunting to make Ld. Hyde a visit, who wrote word she had miscarried & that they wished much to see us, talked of charity &c.”84 It was an unusual request in a period when child mortality was high and miscarriages consequently counted for less. Villiers was an old friend of John Howe, a fellow founding member of the Society of Dilettanti. His wife was Caroline’s age.85 The two women had probably known each other all their lives, for their fathers had been together on the grand tour to Paris in their teenage years. Caroline was reluctant to go. “[W]e could not well excuse ourselves,” she confided to a friend, as the Howes were already engaged to visit Lord and Lady Hyde on some undetermined future date, and were about to set out to hunt at Althorp and Wakefield, “and they might not understand the difference.” Perhaps Lady Hyde was eager to pour out her feelings to a fellow sufferer, although Caroline was not one to enjoy this sort of thing. In any case, sincere sympathy might well have been difficult for Caroline, since Lady Hyde had four healthy children, though she would have no more.86

  The notable life changes that came to siblings William, Mary, Richard, and Thomas in peacetime—marriage for the first two, the start of a family for Richard, shifts in Thomas’s career, both voluntary and involuntary—passed by Caroline, the oldest of them all, now in her early forties. But one significant new change did occur, for it was at this time that she began one of the most important relationships of her life, her friendship with Lady Georgiana Spencer.

  Six

  Caroline and Company

  Caroline Howe’s correspondence with Lady Georgiana Spencer begins with a score or so of letters written during the Seven Years’ War. Over the ensuing fifty years of friendship, it swells to tens of thousands, only ending with the deaths of the two women just months apart in 1814. Today the correspondence between Caroline Howe and Lady Spencer, as she was known, is believed to be the largest single private collection of letters in the British Library.1

  It is a striking illustration of the challenge of re-creating the lives of eighteenth-century women—even conspicuously privileged women who left behind significant archival material—that Caroline is barely mentioned in biographies of the two famous daughters of Lady Spencer: Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, and Harriet Ponsonby, Countess of Bessborough.2 She was a familiar figure in their lives from infancy onward, a fact that comes through in her correspondence with their mother. Caroline took great delight in her friend’s children, particularly the girls. She had an acronym for them—“the dear GAH” (George/Georgiana And Harriet). When Lord and Lady Spencer went on an eighteen-month tour of the Continent in 1763, taking their eldest daughter with them, Caroline checked in on the two youngest and sent Lady Spencer regular reports. “George looked charmingly[,] read to me almost as well as his dear Mamma can do, & showed me his writing,” she wrote after one of her visits. “[Harriet] is vastly grown, & after the first shyness came & took me by the hand of her own accord & chattered away all the time I staid.”3 Both Spencer girls were fond of Caroline and called her by her nickname of “Howey,” a mark of familiarity in a period when formal titles were often used even among family members. “Georgiana screamed out ‘it is Howey’ before I had time to see what it was,” reported Lady Spencer, amused, when a letter from Caroline arrived.4 Caroline Howe remained a part of their everyday lives into adulthood and marriage, a virtual aunt who visited and supported them and was included in their circles.

  Lady Georgiana Spencer, born Georgiana Poyntz in 1737, was Caroline Howe’s half-cousin. Her mother, Anna Maria Mordaunt, had been a celebrated beauty at court, where she served as a maid of honor to Princess Caroline. In 1733, she married Stephen Poyntz, a steward to the household of the Duke of Cumberland.5 Georgiana was the fourth child of their fruitful marriage. She must have met Caroline through her mother’s half-brother, Colonel Charles Mordaunt, who had married Caroline’s Aunt Anne.6 When the teenage Howe sisters visited their cousins Lewis, Osbert, and Harry Mordaunt in London, Georgiana Poyntz was probably often present as well. With fifteen years’ difference in age, however, it is unlikely that the two girls were childhood friends.

  When she was just eighteen, Georgiana was transformed into a leading figure in high society when she married wealthy, handsome John Spencer in 1758. One of the richest men in the kingdom, Spencer had inherited the estate of his great-grandmother, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Worth £750,000, the inheritance corresponded roughly to £160 million in today’s currency. John’s family was taken aback at his choice, surmising that teenage Georgiana had ensnared him: “[S]ome accident has occasioned a familiar acquai
ntance with the girl, and that is sufficient to make a conquest of a boy of his age,” insinuated a relative.7 No wonder the bride’s luck occasioned jealousy, for with no great wealth or connections to boast of, she became mistress of four huge stately houses and the possessor of the fabulous Marlborough diamonds (said to be worth £100,000).8

  But John Spencer had married for love. In an age when marriage was too often a financial transaction, John was wealthy enough to please himself in choosing a wife. Georgiana Poyntz had auburn hair, dark brown eyes, and a sweet manner. In many respects, she embodied the era’s ideal of femininity. When newly married, she captured society’s heart by shedding tears over a begging letter from an indigent stranger while standing in the midst of her enormous trousseau—a pink, blue, and gold heap of lace negligees and satin gowns.9 For Georgiana had sensibility, a gift that was even more highly admired than the musical skills, drawing, and dancing usually displayed by young ladies. In a society that rarely allowed women to be superior to men, the quality of responding with feeling to the world around one was conceded to be a feminine attribute. Women were admitted to be more caring than men.10

  High society’s appetite for romance was filled to overflowing by the circumstances of the wedding itself. John’s family refused to give him permission to marry Georgiana until he was of age, so the day after he became twenty-one, he took his betrothed aside at a ball at Althorp, showed her the license, and “he smilingly asked me if I would marry him now,” recalled Georgiana Spencer. “I told him with all my heart,” and the two were privately married in a bedchamber of the vast palace on December 20, 1755. They rejoined the dance immediately afterward, none of the guests suspecting a thing.11