Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  When the queen perceived that her scoffing was having no effect, she was forced to try a different tack to persuade Henrietta to stay: ‘For God’s sake consider your character! You leave me because the King will not be more particular to you than the others?’ 210

  Defeated at last, though, by Henrietta’s solid opposition in this game of verbal chess, Caroline could only play for time.

  ‘Oh fie, Lady Suffolk, upon my word,’ she expostulated. The idea of resignation was only ‘a very fine notion’ out of a novel. ‘Pray consider, be calm,’ the queen implored. ‘Stay a week longer, won’t you stay this week at my request?’211

  Having won this week’s grace, Caroline tried to have her husband the king prevent her meekest, mildest and most useful servant from leaving court. By now, though, he was as anxious to let Henrietta go as she was herself to depart. ‘What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity for getting rid of her?’ was one account of what he shouted at his wife.212

  Another account – less dramatic but no less nasty – reported that his words were: ‘I don’t know why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary.’213

  Henrietta ended their long relationship with a grace that was in a different realm altogether, conceding in a letter to him that ‘the years to come must be employ’d in the painful task to forget you as my friend; but no years can ever make me forget you as my King’.214 The truth of her statement would indeed be tested, decades later.

  Having served her week’s notice, Henrietta ‘had another audience, complained again of her unkind treatment from the King, was very civil to the Queen, and went that night to her brother’s house in St James’s Square’.215

  So it turned out that when the king, queen and all their servants had vacated Kensington Palace at the end of the summer, Henrietta had been leaving it for the last time ever. On 22 November, amid wonder, disbelief and shock, she departed from St James’s en route for her newly built villa by the river Thames at Marble Hill and for a private life.

  *

  Henrietta’s departure also signalled the breaking up of the cheerful, prank-prone band of the Maids of Honour, although many of them had by now married. (‘We wild girls always make your prudent wives and mothers,’ laughed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.216)

  Some Maids of Honour, though, were less lucky or wise. Miss Anne Vane was described as ‘a maid of honour who was willing to cease to be so upon the first opportunity’, while aspirant Maid of Honour Peggy Bradshaw boasted in correspondence to Henrietta that the king ‘I daresay will like me for my boobies are mightily grown’.217 Peggy also had in hand a gentleman worth £300 per year who fancied her ‘extremely’, but unfortunately he was engaged to someone else. ‘I live in hope’, she concludes, ‘that a loose man may come.’218

  Illegitimate children were far from unknown at St James’s Palace, and the Maids of Honour often seemed to have insider knowledge about their origins. For example, the chapel archives record the evening baptism of ‘a female child about four weeks old’ that was mysteriously ‘dropped in the court’. Two of the Maids of Honour, Miss Tyron and Miss Meadows, were roped in ‘to stand as godmothers’.

  Margaret Cuyler, who grew up to be a courtesan and actress, claimed in later life to be the daughter of an unnamed Maid of Honour and to have played with the royal children. Her assertion rings true because she always seems to have been welcome at court despite her dubious reputation and promiscuous life.219 Even the wise Molly Hervey, on one occasion before her marriage, was ‘drawn into a fine scrape’ and had to seek Dr Arbuthnot’s help: ‘what I am to do in the matter God knows, not I. [I] beg your advice in it.’220 What this ‘scrape’ was and what medical advice was offered remain mysterious but guessable.

  But not everyone got away with ‘dropping’ a child. While Henrietta negotiated a smooth exit from the court, others were brutally expelled: Maid of Honour Sophy Howe, for example, was crushed like a butterfly after her seduction and abandonment by Lord Lonsdale’s brother ‘Nunty’.

  Sophy’s high spirits had always brought her into conflict with the restrictions round court life, and her crush on Nunty Lowther encouraged her to kick over the traces altogether. She ran away from the palace ‘dressed in men’s shoes and breeches’ and made her way to Lowther’s house in town. Here her so-called lover – ‘who she is in love with, and by the way, the town says she is with child by’ – escaped through the back door, while his conniving porter detained Sophy on the front step. The authorities ‘were forced to send to her mother and friends, and they have confined her’.221

  This was the end of Sophy’s career: ‘her pining cheek betray’d her inward smart/ her breaking looks foretold her breaking heart’.222 Yet Sophy was quickly old news at court, and the courtiers complained that ‘poor Howe’s misfortune, is all our theme, and that is almost worn out, so you must send us something new’.223 It showed the truth of John Hervey’s opinion that it was rare for a personal disgrace at court to be ‘anything more than the novel of a fortnight, which everybody would recount and everybody forget’.224

  The Maids of Honour had also lost their old crony, poet John Gay, who’d eventually given up the search for court office in disgust. Driven at last by financial need to real effort, he wrote the spectacular theatrical success The Beggar’s Opera, with its wicked digs at Sir Robert Walpole.

  Dr Arbuthnot could not deny that Gay’s masterpiece contained ‘a great deal of true low humour’, but the outrage and trouble it generated made it much harder and riskier for writers and theatres to stage political plays.225 When Gay himself tried to bring out a sequel, Polly, Walpole promptly had the work banned. John Gay did not long outlive his disappointment, for in 1732 Dr Arbuthnot attended his old friend’s deathbed. He reported that Gay ‘dy’d of an inflammation, and I believe at last a mortification of the bowels; it was the most precipitate case I ever knew, having cut him off in three days’.226

  At the time that Henrietta left court, John Gay’s old flirting partner Molly Hervey was spending a much-needed three-month break in France. This left the coast clear for her husband John to deepen his acquaintance with Anne Vane. Mistress Vane was the poor deluded Maid of Honour who had been taken up and cast aside by a number of courtiers, including some of the very highest rank. She and John Hervey went swiftly from ‘ogling’ each other to sending ‘messages, from messages to letters, from letters to appointments, and from appointments to all the familiarities’. Anne Vane would wrap herself in a cloak and slip on foot into the Hervey household, where ‘they often passed the whole night together’.227

  Molly now expected nothing from this unreliable husband of hers, and they were described as living ‘as if not married at all’ in a loose, uninterested union.228 ‘Marriage is like drinking,’ John Hervey said, ‘it begins with being our cordial & ends with being our poison.’229 Sadly the glow of the court’s former Schatz (or ‘treasure’) was now extinguished by domestic duties: she was ‘a fatigued nurse, a grieved sister, and a melancholy wife’, marooned when in England with her children on the Hervey family estate, Ickworth in Suffolk.230

  ‘I know laudanum can at any time lend me a stock [of good spirits] for present use,’ Molly admitted, but she understood its risks: that repeated indulgence would run her ‘greatly in arrears, and considerably lessen [her] principal, which is already too much impaired to bear a further diminution’.231 She was right to be careful: laudanum is a powerful and addictive mixture of alcohol and opium.

  She was much better off with her old pastime of illicit reading, being on occasion happily and ‘mightily taken up with a book’ of Elizabethan letters.232

  *

  ‘The number of stories & contradictory reasons given for Lady Suffolk’s removing from court wou’d fill more than an ordinary length of one of my letters,’ wrote one courtier soon after the great event.233 Queen Caroline condemned Henrietta’s departure as ‘the silliest thing
she could do’, while the newspapers thought it reprehensible, desirable and incomprehensible in equal measure.234

  But the real explanation was that the death of Henrietta’s husband had removed the ‘danger of falling into his hands’, and that Henrietta herself was ‘desirous to have liberty & a little more time at her own command’.235 Her true friends thought that ‘not only her master & mistress but her very enemies will have reason to repent the part they have acted by her’.236

  After her resignation had created the sensation of a fortnight, though, the waters began to close over Henrietta’s memory. Returning to London in January 1735, John Hervey ‘expected when [he] came to town to hear a great deal about Lady Suffolk; but they talk of her no more than if she did not exist, or than if she never had existed, one might as well ask questions about Henry II and Fair Rosamund; it would hardly seem a story more out of date’.237

  Despite her loss of position, fame and untold opportunities for ‘frizelation’, it seemed that Henrietta had made a lucky escape. Some of her old colleagues commiserated with her loss of station: ‘all ye beau-monde that us’d to crowd about your toilettes will avoid you, as if you had got ye plague’.238 Yet it seems very doubtful that Henrietta much missed the beau monde’s shallow company.

  As Jonathan Swift said of his friend, she’d had little need of her numerous virtues at court.239 The loss of the king’s favour had at first seemed like a setback, but with it the stage was set for her redemption. Henrietta could at last unpack from her chest of virtues her talent for writing and wit and friendship. She would also now have the good fortune to discover which of her acquaintances were really loyal and true to her, something she ‘cou’d never have found out without this change’.240

  And there was also another, hidden, reason driving Henrietta forward on her path of propulsion from the court. While the king had been falling out of love with her, Henrietta was herself falling in love with somebody else.

  The next scandal at court was to be the news of her unexpected and very hasty marriage.

  *

  The court was once again electrified by the news of Henrietta’s swift wedding to Member of Parliament George Berkeley. It took place on 26 June 1735, consummating a relationship that had begun in secret well before her delicate negotiation of her exit from the palace. As the wedding was so unexpected, there was a torrent of gossip: ‘the town’s surpris’d, & the town talks, as the town loves to do on these ordinary extraordinary occasions’.241

  In John Hervey’s opinion, ‘Mr Berkeley was neither young, handsome, healthy, nor rich’, and he heard people wondering what had induced Henrietta ‘to deviate into this unaccountable piece of folly’.242 Others joked cruelly about ‘her deaf-ear, & his lame-leg’ and thought it repulsive that such old people should retire together to the ‘bed on purpose bought, for ye unexpected nuptials’. 243 But George Berkeley was nevertheless only forty-two to Henrietta’s forty-six, and her escape from court life had left her looking ‘better than [she] did seventeen years ago’.244 One of Berkeley’s relations congratulated him upon his wise choice of wife, in which ‘the most agreeable beauties of the mind are joined to those of the body’.245

  Some imagined that the marriage ‘was to pique the King’, but if indeed it had been, Henrietta’s aim was confounded. He wrote to Caroline that ‘ma vieille maîtresse’ had married ‘ce vieux goutteux George Berkeley’, and that ‘je m’en rejouis fort!’ [My old mistress has married gouty old George Berkeley, and I’m really happy about it!].246

  In fact, Berkeley was kind, loving and honest, and his correspondence with his wife shows they shared a deep bond that was admired by all their friends. And, far from being cut by the fashionable world, the couple hosted that summer ‘a greater court now at Marble Hill than at Kensington’.247

  Safe, happy, in love at last, Henrietta had nothing to regret about leaving the court. She had also picked the perfect moment to leave, barely escaping the explosion of the most violent royal quarrel yet.

  Notes

  1. Lord Berkeley of Stratton, quoted in Aston (2008), p. 188.

  2. BL Add MS 22625, f. 4r, Jonathan Swift, ‘Character of the Honorable Mrs [Howard]’.

  3. Ibid., ff. 4v, 5r, Jonathan Swift, ‘Character of the Honorable Mrs [Howard]’.

  4. Tracy Borman, Henrietta Howard, King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant (London, 2007), p. 3.

  5. Hervey (1931), Vol. 1, p. 40.

  6. Franklin (1993), p. 93.

  7. BL Add MS 22627, f. 41r.

  8. Ibid., f. 41v.

  9. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 2, p. 177.

  10. Walpole, Reminiscences (1818 edn), p. 76.

  11. Kroll (1998), p. 214 (St Cloud, 30 June 1718).

  12. Keith Thomas, ‘The Double Standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 20, No. 2 (April 1959), pp. 195–216.

  13. John Kelyng, Lord Chief Justice, quoted in J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986), p. 95.

  14. Quoted in A. D. Harvey, Sex in Georgian England (London, 1994; 2001), p. 57.

  15. Valerie Rumbold, Women’s Place in Pope’s World (Cambridge, 1989), p. 212.

  16. BL Add MS 22627, f. 42f.

  17. Ibid., f. 13r.

  18. Halsband and Grundy (1977), p. 231.

  19. BL Add MS 22627, f. 70r, Lady Lansdowne to Mrs Howard.

  20. BL Add MS 22628, f. 30r, Molly Hervey to Henrietta Howard (10 July 1731).

  21. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 277.

  22. BL Add MS 22627, f. 94r.

  23. Ambrose Phillips, epilogue to The Distrest Mother (London, 1712).

  24. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 272.

  25. Franklin (1993), p. 95.

  26. Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwick, Walpoliana (London, 1783), p. 6.

  27. BL Add MS 22627, f. 94.

  28. Walpole, Reminiscences (1818 edn), p. 22.

  29. Coxe, Robert Walpole (1816 edn), Vol. 3, pp. 261–2.

  30. Black (2004b), p. 77.

  31. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 917.

  32. The Historical Register containing an Impartial Relation of all Transactions, Foreign and Domestick, Vol. 12 (London, 1727), p. 17.

  33. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 2, p. 519.

  34. BL Add MS 69285, f. 95r, Harriet Pitt to her mother (27 June 1727).

  35. Earl of Strafford to James the Pretender (21 June 1727), quoted in Lord Mahon, History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles, 1713–83 (London, 1858), Vol. 2, p. 119.

  36. Thomas Prince (1727), quoted in Smith (2006), p. 19.

  37. Halsband (1965–7), Vol. 2, p. 85 (October 1727).

  38. Llanover (1861), Vol. 1, p. 138 (1727).

  39. The Walpole Society, Vol. 17 (1933–4) (Vertue III), pp. 73, 140.

  40. Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D.540, f. 111, Kent’s notes in the back of ‘Breve Compendio delle Metamorfosi di Ovidio, Istoricamente spiegate e descritte da Guglielmo Kent’.

  41. The Walpole Society, Vol. 22 (1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 55.

  42. The Earl of Ilchester (Ed.), Lord Hervey and his Friends, 1726–38, based on letters from Holland House, Melbury, and Ickworth (London, 1950), p. 116.

  43. Sir Thomas Coke to the Earl of Burlington (26 November 1736), quoted in Charles Warburton James, Chief Justice Coke (1929), pp. 228–9.

  44. ‘An Epistle from Ld. Lovel to Lord Chesterfield at Bath, Wrote by Mr Poulteney’, quoted in James (1929), p. 230.

  45. Halsband (1965–7), Vol. 2, pp. 98–9 (30 October [?] 1734).

  46. BL Add MS 31144, f. 454v, Peter Wentworth to his brother (23 April 1714).

  47. Halsband (1965–7), Vol. 3, p. 22.

  48. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 277.

  49. Henrietta’s words provided by Horace Walpole, quoted in Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 272.

  50. HMC Polwarth, Vol. 5, p. 6, Arthur Villette to the Earl of Marchmont (June 1727).

  51. Halsband (1965–7), Vol. 2, p. 86, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Lady Mar (October 1727).

 
; 52. Hervey (1931), Vol. 1, p. xiv.

  53. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 347.

  54. Hannah Smith and Stephen Taylor, ‘Lord Hervey’s Frederick’, paper given at Politics and Patronage: a tercentenary colloquium for Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, The History of Parliament Trust, London (14 April 2007) and subsequently published. I gratefully acknowledge their work on Hervey.

  55. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 349.

  56. Hervey (1894), Vol. 3, p. 64, Earl of Bristol to Molly (7 October 1730).

  57. SRO 941/21/2(ii), ‘A Character of Lady Mary Hervey’, f. 3.

  58. Hervey (1931), Vol. 1, pp. 103–4.

  59. Horace Walpole commenting on Lord Chesterfield’s character of Queen Caroline, BL Stowe MS 308, f. 1v; Franklin (1993), p. 96.

  60. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 280.

  61. Walpole, Reminiscences (1818 edn), p. 64.

  62. Wraxall (1904), p. 257.

  63. Hervey (1931), Vol. 1, p. 153.

  64. Quoted in Wilkins (1901), Vol. 2, p. 44.

  65. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 361.

  66. Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 93; Vol. 2, p. 473.

  67. Ibid., p. 94.

  68. Fielding (1732), p. 29.

  69. Croker (1824), Vol. 1, p. 335, Lady Hervey to Mrs Howard (7 July 1729).

  70. BL Add MS 22627, f. 5v (n.d., c.1728).

  71. Kilburn (2004).

  72. BL Add MS 22628, f. 100r, George Berkeley to unknown (1735); Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 20, p. 88 (17 August 1749).

  73. Bielfeld (1770), Vol. 4, p. 41, translator’s note; Smith (2006), p. 59.

  74. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 431.

  75. Jonathan Swift, Dean Swift’s Literary Correspondence (London, 1741), p. 133.

  76. Saussure (1902), pp. 139, 136.

  77. Quoted in Impey (2003), p. 81.

  78. Pottle (1950), p. 265; Thomas Faulkner, History and Antiquities of Kensington (London, 1820), Vol. 2, p. 411.