What of Britain’s European foes? Spain did not regain Gibraltar, but it did gain Minorca and Florida, only to lose the latter to the emerging United States less than forty years later. France gained very little from the war—nothing in India, and only the small island of Tobago in the West Indies. France had hoped that the new American republic would divert its commerce to its Gallic ally, but this did not transpire. Instead, France emerged from the war mired in crippling debt, a fact that contributed substantially to its own revolution only six years later.
For the Howes, the American War of Independence had been punctuated throughout by difficulties and aggravations, and the final months of the conflict were no exception. The signing of the preliminary peace treaty in January 1783 meant that French travelers once again ventured across the English Channel to Britain. One of these was the Duke of Chartres, who arrived in London in early May. The duke and his companions were greeted by the highest ranks of English society in a flurry of social engagements, including at Devonshire House, where he was entertained with a “grand supper and ball.” Caroline declined being one of the attendees, roundly stating her intention of “shirking the nasty foreigners.”126
Caroline found a kindred spirit in Hugo Meynell, MP and Leicestershire landowner, who was the leader of the famous Quorn Hunt and known as England’s foremost foxhunter.127 Caroline declared approvingly of Mr. Meynell—the very stereotype of a John Bull—that he “hates all foreign company, says we shall never have peace, till we have another war.” Caroline of course was glad to see the end of the war, but her instinctive animosity toward the old enemy was unabated. “I shall be sorry if we are to make peace with France without giving them first one good bang,” she had written shortly after her brother’s return from Gibraltar.128
Richard Howe’s final engagement during the War of Independence was fought on English soil against an English foe. In October 1783, Captain John Hervey, Lord Hervey, a young naval officer, claimed in the newspapers that the relief of Gibraltar had been mismanaged, and an opportunity to strike a decisive blow at the enemy had been missed. Contemporary notions of honor required Richard to challenge him to a duel. Lady Spencer was beside herself with outrage, calling Hervey “a strange conceited pert Coxcomb.” It was horrid, she went on, that “such a Man” should be in a position to put Lord Howe’s life at risk.
The confrontation ended without violence, for Captain Hervey relented and begged Richard’s pardon. Caroline, hearing it all from William, recounted the episode in detail to Lady Spencer: “[W]hen they came upon the Field my brother gave him a paper which he insisted upon his signing, [Captain Hervey] refused and the seconds were desired by Ld. Howe to retire,” indicating that the duel would commence. At this point, Hervey seemed to lose his nerve:
Ld. Hervey then said he would sign if one word was left out, this was consented to, & he did sign the second letter you read in the papers. I should mention that when he was compelled to sign, he said to Lord Howe I think I have a right to find fault with your publick conduct; yes certainly, was the answer, and I never can desire to prevent anyone speaking their opinion upon any publick transaction of mine, it would look as if I was guilty if I did; it is the insult upon my private character that has brought me here, and I must add one thing more, that when you say any thing reflecting upon my publick one, take care of the truth of your facts.129
Richard’s words carried an unmistakable threat; his raw Howe courage and deep sense of personal honor still burned strongly.
Fourteen
The Glorious Return
By the close of the American War of Independence in 1783, it had been almost fifty years since Scrope Lord Howe had died in Barbados, leaving the Howe dynasty with an uncertain future. The childhood world that centered on the village of Langar had all but disappeared; all the Howe children had left the neighborhood, and a steward now looked after crumbling, antique Langar Hall.1 Caroline, casting a retrospective eye over the family adventures since the death of her aunt, Lady Pembroke, in 1749, might have wondered whether she and her siblings had lived up to the ambitious plans that lady had formed on their behalf.
The old Nottingham connections still survived within Caroline’s London circle. Caroline’s cousin Mary, who in 1747 had been married into the Smith banking family as part of Aunt Pembroke’s scheme to get George Lord Howe into Parliament, had by now been resting in a Nottinghamshire graveyard for twenty years. Caroline encountered Mary’s son Sir George Bromley and his wife in metropolitan drawing rooms.2 Aunt Anne Mordaunt’s sons Charles and Osbert, childhood companions of the Howe children, remained in touch with their Howe cousins, calling from time to time at Grafton Street. Both had careers in the army, and Charles would eventually become an aide-de-camp to George III.3
Though not a single Howe now sat in the House of Commons, Richard’s elevation to the House of Lords would have greatly gratified Aunt Pembroke. Yet she would have been dismayed to see the problems with fertility endured by herself and her sister Juliana Page replicated in her brother’s children. In 1783, six of Scrope Howe’s children were still living, and five were married, yet only one, Admiral Richard Howe, had children, all of them girls who could not inherit their father’s title.
At sixty-one, Caroline was on the threshold of old age. As with everything else, she had an opinion about getting old. After a visit to a woman who was nearing eighty, she wrote to Lady Spencer to express her sadness at seeing how altered one must become with advancing years, “& of how little use or entertainment one can be to any body.” But, characteristically, she had a remedy: “Whilst a person can read & entertain themselves alone it is a different story.”4 Caroline, however, was in no danger of such isolation. Life in Grafton Street would continue to hold variety, and the Howe dynastic fortunes were still set to change.
Ironically, it was her younger friend Lady Spencer whose horizons would shrink. On October 31, 1783, after a prolonged illness, Lord Spencer died. He was only forty-eight. The new Dowager Lady Spencer could no longer be mistress at Althorp, Wimbledon, or Spencer House; she had to give way to her son George and his wife, Lady Lavinia Bingham, whom he had married in March 1782. An attractive and intelligent young woman, Lavinia would become a notable society hostess. On the surface of things, she also had much in common with Lady Spencer. Religious and charitable, she eschewed the gambling and high living of the two Spencer girls. Yet Lady Spencer’s relationship with her daughter-in-law remained cool.5
Within days of her husband’s death, Lady Spencer moved to Holywell House in St. Albans, Hertfordshire, near Lord Howe’s seat of Porter’s Lodge. Holywell was beautiful and secluded but decidedly run-down, with smoking chimneys and collapsing walls. Lady Spencer would be obliged to retreat from one section of the house to another to make way for renovations, but she preferred the inconvenience of the dilapidated old house to the sense of loss that overwhelmed her in the residences where she and Lord Spencer had spent their married life.6
Widowed now at forty-six, Lady Spencer had no intention of marrying again. She set forth her views on the subject in a letter to Caroline. If a woman had been unhappily married, she reasoned, how could she bring herself to risk wedlock a second time? If, on the other hand, she had truly loved her deceased husband, “Gracious God is it possible she can ever think of replacing what is lost[?]” Engrossed in her moralizing strain, Lady Spencer seemed to have forgotten that just three years earlier, Caroline had endured extensive teasing on the subject of matrimony and Mr. Rigby. Caroline retorted that if Lady Spencer would consider “a little more of human nature,” and the wide variation in individual personalities, “perhaps your surprise & wonderment would not be so great, at the possibility of now & then a Lady thinking in a different manner than you do on the subject.” Not for the first time, Caroline put her rather smug friend in her place with what Lady Spencer called one of her “hard raps.”7
As the war in America drew to its close, a new young royal made his entry into London society, and into Caroline
’s drawing room as well. George, Prince of Wales—destined to become George IV in 1820—is best remembered as the dissipated prince regent who occupied the throne of Britain during the final years of the reign of George III, when his father was notoriously stricken with mental illness. Born in 1762 and brought up under the strict regime of the royal household, the Prince of Wales early on evinced a proclivity for self-indulgence and loose living that would characterize his adult life. When he was just fifteen, a prescient tutor prophesied, “He will either be the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe, possibly an admixture of both.”8 His relationship with his straitlaced parent replicated the animosity between monarch and crown prince that had dogged each generation of Hanoverians since they had ascended the British throne in 1714.
By the time the prince reached sixteen, there were already rumors of affairs; a year later, his involvement with an actress was public knowledge.9 This was followed by an infatuation with Elizabeth Armitstead, a fashionable courtesan who moved in the circle of Charles James Fox and his Whig friends. Mrs. Armitstead included among her clients Lord George Cavendish, who was part of Caroline’s circle. Happening to visit Mrs. Armitstead late one evening, Cavendish found the prince cowering behind a door, hoping not to be discovered. Lord George’s sense of humor came to his aid; he burst out laughing while managing a bow and made his departure, leaving the embarrassed prince alone with his favorite.10
Caroline doubtless heard all about it, for her source was impeccable. She would have heard, too, of the raucous party the prince attended at the home of Lord Chesterfield. The carousing reached such heights that a drunken guest seized an aggressive dog by the tongue and was mauled by the outraged beast. The rake who assaulted the dog was George Pitt, nephew of Caroline’s sister Mary and her husband, General Pitt. The prince was too overcome with liquor by the end of the evening to drive home; his health was impaired for weeks afterward, causing alarm in the royal household.11
While Caroline was fully aware of such juvenile carryings-on, she encountered the prince in more decorous settings. He was infatuated with the Duchess of Devonshire, and Caroline met him on casual visits to Devonshire House and at fashionable parties, where they played cards together.12 The prince also became part of Mr. Rigby’s set, occasionally staying at Mistley Hall.13
In fact, the wild young prince seemed to appreciate the company of older people, provided they were good-humored and nonjudgmental. He was fond of Princess Amelia, his great-aunt, and he sometimes made an appearance at Gunnersbury, where he joined her elderly guests, including Caroline Howe, for cards.14 George was aware of the kindredness between himself and the Howes. Years later, the prince’s younger brother William, who would become King William IV, recalled that the Howes were “a sort of connexion of the family.”15 This was the last echo of the old blood relationship between the Howe children’s German grandmother, Sophia von Kielmansegg, and the Hanoverian kings of Britain.
Caroline did seem to relate to George on the familiar footing of an aunt rather than as a courtier, just as her relationship with Princess Amelia was “sisterly.” “[A] parcel of idiots” was what she bluntly labeled the Prince of Wales and his companions on an occasion when they dined with John Crawfurd, who lived two doors away in Grafton Street. Caroline had gifted Crawfurd a live pig, following the country practice of sending the animal to the butcher’s to be slaughtered and roasted on the same day. But Crawfurd’s West End kitchen staff proved to be too refined to understand such rural methods. Instead, they locked up the animal, and when the Prince of Wales arrived, he insisted on having the pig brought into the drawing room, “& Grunting, in it come,” wrote Caroline in disgust. She added: “I am tired & can tell you no more of this history only that Mr Rigby insisted it could now never be put to death as being admitted into a royal presence was always a certain pardon, & hallowing & hooping at poor me, his life is spared.” The illustrious guests presumably made do with cold meat. The fortunate pig was dispatched to an estate in the countryside to be kept for breeding purposes.16
Now that her brothers were no longer away at war, Caroline made room in her correspondence for more everyday topics. She was determined to keep fit, walking a great deal, just as her Aunt Pembroke had done years earlier. To push herself when she was in town, she would sometimes alight from her carriage ahead of her destination and proceed the rest of the way on foot.17 At age fifty-seven, while on a visit to a riverside manor house, she spotted a barge drifting down the Thames and ran down to the waterfront, following it alongshore for as long as she was able. She returned “breathless and sweaty,” noted the ever-critical Lady Mary Coke.18 Caroline never entirely lost her country manners, or the relative fitness they conferred.
Caroline, like all the Howes, loved dogs. In early 1782, when her dog Bella died, her personal maid Renshaw tried to console her with a puppy named Beau. “Renshaw has brought me a little black terrier from the dog man, I say I won’t have it & I cd. cry every time it jumps up,” she told Lady Spencer. A puppy, however, was not to be resisted. Soon it was playing around Caroline while she wrote at her desk, and she made excuses to Lady Spencer, telling her of “my little Beau with his ball every instant, which is this days excuse for blots & blurs” in her penmanship. His pedigree was dubious, probably a mix of terrier and spaniel. Caroline referred tactfully to his “elegant combined beauty,” his “curled hair & a noble large Tail,” telling Lady Spencer, “I assure you his father was a span[ie]l his mother French.”19
Dogs repeatedly appeared in Howe family portraits and stories. Lady Charlotte Howe had her spaniel beside her in her 1719 wedding portrait. Her mother, Sophia von Kielmansegg, chose to have her likeness painted with her little black pug by her side. Famously, William’s dog, by tradition a fox terrier, was found behind the American lines after the Battle of Germantown in 1777, its collar revealing its redcoat master’s name. The name of the dog has not been preserved, but its fate was well documented. Washington ordered it to be returned to General Howe with a polite note. When it arrived in the British camp, an officer noted that Sir William was so gratified to see his pet again that he took the little dog up onto his lap, oblivious to its muddy coat and paws.20
Caroline’s love of dogs preserved for us the story of another war dog, a Newfoundland, who also was a veteran of the War of Independence. The dog had belonged to the American General Richard Montgomery, who was slain in the unsuccessful American attack on Quebec in December 1775. At first, the faithful animal refused to leave his master’s body, but eventually he was adopted by a British officer, who christened him Rebel.
It doubtless seemed a good jest to call Rebel to heel in the British camp, but in 1777, the situation was reversed, and the dog’s new master was himself a prisoner at Saratoga. London newspapers reported good-humoredly that the redcoat officer found himself shouting “Rebel” in the midst of his captors, and then clumsily converted the call into a whistle. By all accounts, the Americans thought it funny, and the dog was “held in great estimation.”21
Caroline covered several sheets of paper chronicling the fate of Rebel and his progeny for Lady Spencer. The pet was brought to England and went on to sire a second generation. His son, also called Rebel, was adopted by another veteran of Saratoga, Lieutenant Colonel John Lind. Young Rebel lived in Plymouth and became as distinguished as his sire for loyalty. He was so “sensible,” said the delighted Caroline, that when Colonel Lind went fishing, Rebel carried the day’s catch home alone so that his master could remain out of doors. On one occasion, when Rebel stopped to fight another dog and left the catch forgotten by the roadside, he went back and retrieved it after being admonished by Lind.22 Rebel’s clever antics were a welcome diversion at the end of a wearisome and disappointing war, one of the longest of the century.
William showed signs of the immense strain he had endured in the wake of the parliamentary inquiry, and Caroline was concerned. Six months after its conclusion, she wrote to Lady Spencer that he had lost we
ight. But after April 1782, when business brought him once again into town as lieutenant general of the Ordnance, she was pleased to see an improvement. Fanny did not always accompany her husband, instead remaining at her mother’s residence, Copt Hall, in nearby Twickenham. So brother and sister were often together, an arrangement that no doubt was mutually satisfactory, as they had always had a close relationship. They attended dinners, card parties, and the theater. At the end of 1783, Caroline wrote happily, “I think I never saw William look better.”23
William wished to live near his family again. In 1782, he had been offered the post of commander in chief of the British forces in Ireland, but he declined; it went to Burgoyne.24 He preferred a desk job. It is hard not to conclude that he had become disenchanted with the military career that fortune had obliged him to take up as a young man. He had joined the service not out of personal inclination but because it was what his family and his position in life required. Like all the Howe boys, he was gifted in the military arts, but that did not mean he would have chosen that path in life if he had been left to decide on his own. He had served with zeal in the wars against the French, he had shown himself keen to avenge the death of his brother George, and he had fought to the greatest of his ability in the War of Independence. Now, in his early fifties, he was disgusted and disillusioned with the disastrous fallout from his American command. Accusations of mistreatment of American civilians and prisoners that had dogged his command in that war particularly rankled; in his sole pamphlet, he gave a rare glimpse into his feelings on the matter: “I am contented that strictures should be made upon my professional conduct; but I feel myself hurt as a man, when I am accused of inhumanity.”25
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