King's Mistress, Queen's Servant: The Life and Times of Henrietta Howard

by Tracy Borman

  Like everything else at court, mealtimes were governed by rigid codes of etiquette and ceremony, which were then mirrored in fashionable households across England. Guests would walk into the dining room in strict order of rank, ladies first. The mistress (in this case the Princess) would sit at one end of the table, surrounded by the most important female guests. The other would be occupied by her husband and all of the gentlemen present. This division of the sexes often led to overexuberance among the male diners, whose boisterous habits of drinking loud healths and reciting lewd ballads went unchecked by the ladies seated a safe distance away.

  Some attempts to curb these excesses were made later on in the century by John Trusler, who published The Honours of the Table, a series of rules for behaviour during meals. This advised that it was vulgar to eat too quickly or too slowly, as it showed that one was either too hungry or did not like the food. Guests should also avoid smelling the meat whilst it was on the fork because it implied that they suspected it was tainted. Trusler warned of a number of other faux pas. ‘It is exceedingly rude to scratch any part of your body, to spit, or blow your nose . . . to lean your elbows on the plate, to sit too far from it, to pick your teeth before the dishes are removed.’ And woe betide anyone who had the call of nature during meals. If it was too urgent to be ignored, then they must steal from the table unobserved and return without making any mention of where they had been. Jonathan Swift poked fun at such rigid strictures in his satirical handbook, Directions to Servants, which recommended practices that would have made Trusler faint away in horror: from combing one’s hair over the cooking, to eating half the meat before it went to table, and keeping quiet about any lumps of soot that accidentally fell into the soup.

  The obsession with order and ceremony at the royal table was matched by the lavishness of the fare that was served. Enormous quantities of food were consumed by the assembled guests, and the predominance of meat astonished foreign visitors. ‘I always heard that they [the English] were great flesh-eaters, and I found it true,’ wrote one. ‘Among the middling sort of people they had 10 or 12 sorts of common meats which infallibly takes their turns at their tables.’17 The first course to be served almost always consisted of various types of meat, some of which was accompanied by sauces. Stewed or potted venison, pork sausages, ‘jugged’ pigeons, pheasant with prune sauce – all made their way to the tables at court. Vegetables such as turnips, carrots and parsnips were served occasionally, but many people believed them to be bad for the health and steered well clear. Dessert was the final course to arrive. Strawberry fritters, whipped syllabubs, jellies and sweetmeats were favourites with the sweet-toothed Georgians. A healthier option of fresh fruit was also included, and the privileged classes were treated to exotic varieties such as pineapples, peaches and grapes, which were grown in the hothouses that had started to spring up across the country. This sumptuous feast would have been washed down with wine, followed by coffee or hot chocolate, and all three beverages would have been generously sweetened with sugar.

  It is hardly surprising that after the last dishes had been cleared, the Prince and Princess would retire to their apartments for a postprandial nap. But they were soon back on the social round. For Caroline, this involved making calls. Ladies of quality passed most of their afternoons going from house to house drinking tea, which was a luxury commodity in those days. Etiquette demanded that if a caller came while the lady of the house was out and left a card, that visit must be returned the following day. This meant that members of fashionable society were constantly flitting around London in sedan chairs and carriages, catching up with their obligations and making calls of their own choosing.

  Gentlemen, meanwhile, idled away many hours in the new coffee houses that were opening up across the capital, such as White’s Chocolate House in St James’s Street or Lloyd’s of Lombard Street. Here they would read newspapers or debate political matters whilst enjoying their coffee or hot chocolate. One foreign traveller to London was astonished by the number of these establishments, and by the variety of pursuits that went on within them. ‘Some coffee houses are a resort for learned scholars and wits; others are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.’18

  Such was the social whirl into which Caroline and George threw themselves. They were swept up by, but at the same time dictated, the fashionable life of London. At a public dinner one day, they were delighted to see the ‘country folks’ wearing straw hats, and when the Princess noticed that one girl had come without hers, she sent her home to get it. This prompted several of the gentry present, who were eager to win favour with the royal couple, to don straw hats the following day.

  The Prince and Princess certainly seemed to have the knack of courting ordinary people and high society alike, and they were loved for it. Their charm offensive worked so well that just a few months into the reign, the foreign traveller and diarist Sir Dudley Ryder noted: ‘I find all backward in speaking to the king, but ready enough to speak to the prince.’19

  Knowing that his son was more popular with the English than he was himself irritated George I intensely and fuelled the growing discord between the two. But rather than focusing upon improving his own public profile, he handed the Prince and Princess a further advantage by announcing that he was leaving for a visit to Hanover. He had been itching to do so ever since he had inherited the British crown: he missed the order and familiarity of the court at Herrenhausen, and in particular the obedience of his people there, who were a good deal less troublesome than his fractious English subjects. His timing could not have been worse. Sympathy for the Jacobites remained strong, and people were still smarting from the heavy expenses to which he had subjected them in pursuance of Hanoverian interests. It was in vain that his ministers pressed these points upon him, and the King left London in June 1716. Those who watched him go said that he was the most animated they had seen him since his arrival in England.

  Much to the Prince’s resentment, the King did not trust him enough to make him regent during his absence. Instead, he revived a title that had not been in use since the Black Prince’s time in the fourteenth century – that of ‘Guardian of the Realm and Lieutenant’. This carried less authority than the position of regent, and George further restricted his son’s powers by insisting that the Duke of Argyll, the Prince’s trusted friend and adviser, should be dismissed. The Prince was livid and his wife was ‘all in a flame’, but in the end they relented, and the King, having won his point, set out for Hanover.20

  Chapter 6

  The Swiss Cantons

  * * *

  NO SOONER HAD THE royal yacht set sail than George and Caroline were acting the part of King and Queen in all but name. Their court was even livelier than before. They kept open house and lived from morning to night in a perpetual round of gaiety. A little over a week after the King’s departure, they left the cramped confines of St James’s and repaired to Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s magnificent pleasure palace by the Thames. Their very journey was a spectacle to behold as they made a progress up the river in state barges hung with crimson and gold, and headed by a band playing music.

  The Prince and Princess passed the whole of that summer at Hampton Court, and everything they did was on a grand scale. As a public relations exercise, it was faultless: by demonstrating what a brilliant court they could hold, they simultaneously drew attention to the sharp contrast with George I’s staidness and reserve. They gathered around them the glitterati of Georgian society: all of its wittiest, most beautiful, wealthiest, cleverest and most talented members were there. Ordinary people, too, flocked to Hampton Court, eager to witness the most extravagant royal entertainments since the decadent days of Charles II.

  They were not disappointed. The Prince and Princess appeared in public several times a day. It was one of the finest summers for years, and in the mornings they would take the air on the river in richly decorated golden barges, hung with curtains o
f crimson silk and wreathed with flowers. One of the visitors noted with some astonishment that ‘all sorts of people have free admission to see them even of the lowest sort and rank’, shrewdly adding: ‘They gain very much upon the people by that means.’1

  In the afternoons, the Prince and Princess would walk in the elegant palace gardens for two or three hours, followed by the Maids of Honour and their beaux. The Prince would then play a game of bowls with the gentlemen of the court, while his wife and her ladies sat in the nearby pavilion and chatted, played cards and drank tea until dusk.

  The eager crowds were sometimes treated to another glimpse of the royal party in the evening, when they chose to take supper in public. After this, there would be the traditional court pastimes of music, dancing or cards. More often than not, though, they each had private suppers and parties in their apartments, attended by a few select friends. It was often late into the night before everyone finally retired. This pattern was repeated day after day and night after night. It was a bewildering round of entertainments that would have exhausted even the most energetic of courtiers, but the fact that Caroline was at this time heavily pregnant with her fifth child made her stamina all the more impressive.

  The gaiety and diversions of court life during that summer at Hampton Court extended to the ladies and gentlemen of the royal household. Chief among them was Henrietta. During her two years in the Princess’s service, she had developed social graces commensurate with the most seasoned courtier. Her lively wit and keen intellect were feted throughout the court, and her discretion, mildness and good nature won her many friends among the Maids of Honour and other members of the court. ‘She has as much Good nature as if she had never seen any Ill nature, and had been bred among Lambs and Turtle-doves, instead of Princes and Court-ladies,’ Pope once said of her, and this view was shared by many others.

  On the evenings when her mistress chose to dine privately, Henrietta held supper parties in her own apartments at Hampton Court. These were likely to have been on the eastern range of the new palace built by Wren, overlooking the magnificent ‘Fountain Court’. If so, they were directly above those occupied by the Princess and were linked to her State Bedchamber by means of a small staircase. This meant that Henrietta could swiftly respond to any summons from her mistress that might arrive while she was off duty. The Maids of Honour nicknamed these chambers ‘the Swiss Cantons’, and Mrs Howard ‘the Swiss’, on account of the neutral position she occupied between conflicting interests at court.

  Discretion was a rare quality among members of the Georgian court, with its daily round of scandals, and Henrietta’s companions were grateful for it. Flirtations (or ‘frizelations’, as Henrietta called them) were a common feature of the evening parties in the Swiss Cantons. These were lively gatherings, attracting some of the wittiest and most vivacious members of the court. Among them was Philip Dormer Stanhope, later Earl of Chesterfield. An exuberant young man of twenty-two, he had a somewhat unprepossessing appearance. Lord Hervey described him as being ‘as disagreeable as it was possible for a human figure to be without being deformed . . . He was very short, disproportioned, thick, and clumsily made; had a broad, rough-featured, ugly face, with black teeth, and a head big enough for a polyphemus.’ But Stanhope’s intellect and humour more than made up for his physical deformities. His amusing letters and anthologies were celebrated throughout the court. Dr Johnson described him as a ‘lord among wits’, and even Lord Hervey admitted that he had ‘more conversable entertaining table-wit than any man of his time’, adding: ‘he affected following many women of the first beauty and the most in fashion’.2

  Among these was Henrietta. She and Stanhope had first met a year earlier, when he had been appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales. She delighted in his company, which enlivened the monotony of her duties at court, and he was similarly enchanted by her gentle wit and intelligent conversation. The two soon became close friends, and the bond between them was strengthened by their shared experiences in the household of the Prince and Princess.

  Undoubtedly the greatest of the wits and poets to frequent Henrietta’s apartments that summer, though, was Alexander Pope. Like Chesterfield, Pope’s physical stature made him somewhat disadvantaged. He was just four feet six inches in height and had a humped back. His physique was further hampered by a fragile constitution, and he was dogged by ill health throughout his life. Chesterfield referred to his ‘poor, crazy, deformed body’ as a ‘mere Pandora’s Box, containing all the physical ills that ever afflicted humanity’. His face bore noble and intelligent features, however, and the famous eighteenth-century artist Sir Joshua Reynolds found it a fascinating subject: ‘He had a large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which are always found in the mouths of crooked persons; and the muscles which ran across the cheek were so strongly marked that they seemed like small cords.’3

  But Pope’s physical defects were eclipsed by the brilliance of his poetry, and by the time Mrs Howard made his acquaintance, he had already become one of the leading lights of the literary world in Georgian England. In 1709 he had published the Pastorals to great acclaim, followed by An Essay on Criticism and the mock epic Rape of the Lock three years later. His most famous work, though, was his translation of Homer’s Iliad, published around 1714, which had achieved such widespread popularity that even George I and his son were among the subscribers. Pope’s literary talent was matched by his skill in conversation, which was littered with irreverent observations and flattery, and he soon became a firm favourite with the Princess’s ladies.

  As well as poets, wits and Maids of Honour, Henrietta’s supper parties also included the most illustrious member of the Hampton Court set: the Prince of Wales himself. Attracted more by the charms of the Maids of Honour than by the diverting conversation, George became a frequent visitor to Mrs Howard’s apartments. He found the hostess’s modesty and discretion appealing, and was flattered by her patient interest in his tediously long accounts of the military campaigns in which he had fought. The attention he paid to her led some to speculate that they were already lovers.4 Pope hinted at it in a poem written to the Maids of Honour at around this time:

  But should you catch the Prudish itch,

  And each become a coward,

  Bring sometimes with you Lady R– [Rich]

  And sometimes Mistress H–d [Howard]

  For Virgins, to keep chaste, must go

  Abroad with such as are not so.

  It is not clear whether Pope was implying that Mrs Howard and Mrs Rich were not virgins or that they were not chaste. The fact that Lady Rich was well known for her marital infidelity does lead one to suspect that it was the latter. While it was entirely acceptable for a prince of the royal blood to bed ladies at court, it was less so if they were married. In Henrietta’s case, this was complicated by the fact that her husband worked in the King’s service, and Charles Howard’s notoriously volatile nature made it all the more necessary for her to keep such rumours from him. It is therefore unlikely that she would have enjoyed the humour in Pope’s verse. Besides, there is little to suggest that her relationship with the Prince had gone beyond harmless flirtation at this stage.

  The summer of 1716 at Hampton court passed in a round of receptions, parties, recitals and other diversions. All the gaiety and flirtation that had been suppressed in the dowdy rooms of St James’s now burst into life. In a letter to Henrietta written a dozen or so years later, Molly Lepel wistfully recalled ‘a thousand agreeable things’ from that time. ‘I really believe a frizelation wou’d be a surer means of restoring my spirits than the exercise and hartshorn I now make use of,’ she wrote. ‘I don’t suppose that name still subsists, but pray let me know if the thing it self does, and if ye meet in the same cheerfull manner to supp as formerly; are ballads or epigrams the consequence of these meetings? is good sence in the morning and wit in the evening the subject or rather the foundation of the conversation?’5


  Beneath the frivolity that summer was an undercurrent of political scheming. Hampton Court became a magnet for dissenters from the existing regime, including malcontent Whigs, supporters of the Tory opposition, and even some suspected Jacobites. The Duke of Argyll was among the Tory contingent, despite having been dismissed from his offices at George I’s explicit instruction. Meanwhile, the King’s faithful servant Bothmer was playing spy and sending frequent reports back to his master in Hanover.

  The two principal ministers in government, Lord Townshend and Sir Robert Walpole, decided that swift action was required to prevent the royal couple from falling completely under the spell of the Opposition. Walpole went to see for himself what was happening at Hampton Court, and was dismayed to find that Argyll was frequently granted private audiences with the Prince and Princess. He wrote anxiously to Townshend: ‘You can entirely conjecture what must be the consequence of these appearances . . . They have such an effect already, as draws the tories from all parts of the neighbourhood, gives such a disgust to the Whigs as before michaelmas I may venture to prophecy, the company here will be two of the king’s enemies.’6

  Townshend went at once to join his fellow minister at the palace. It is proof of the influence that Henrietta now had – or was perceived to have – that he paid his court first to her in the hope that by these means he would ‘insinuate himself mightily in the favour of the Prince’. In so doing, he had underestimated that of Princess Caroline, who was affronted by his neglect. A word from her woman of the Bedchamber, Lady Cowper, urging him ‘how wrong his usage of the Princess was, and how much it was for his interest to get her on their side’, made him quickly change tactics.7 Before long, Townshend had succeeded in winning favour with the royal couple, and a political crisis for the Whigs was averted – for the time being at least.