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

by Tracy Borman

  As summer drew to a close, the royal party bade farewell to Hampton Court and made their way back to St James’s Palace. A few days after their arrival, the Princess went into labour. All the gaiety and harmony that had existed that summer quickly evaporated, and tensions again arose between the Hanoverian and English courtiers. A German midwife had been assigned to oversee the birth, but she claimed that the English ladies of the household had threatened to have her hanged if the baby died. With Caroline becoming increasingly agitated as her pains came in ever stronger waves, the midwife stood by, refusing to touch her unless she and the Prince agreed to defend her against such threats. Upon hearing of this, George flew into such a rage that he vowed to throw the perpetrators out of the window. Lord Townshend eventually managed to restore order by taking hold of the midwife, shaking her and making ‘kind faces’ in order to bring her to her senses. This furore can hardly have been soothing for the Princess, who was suffering a traumatic labour, and after several days she was delivered of a dead prince.

  Further trouble was to come, for as Caroline lay recovering in her bedchamber, the King was making his way back from Hanover. He arrived in London at the beginning of December in a foul temper, fuelled by a tiresome journey and fierce resentment at having to take leave of his beloved homeland. There he had been feted and honoured as a ruler should be, in stark contrast to the treatment he had received from his upstart English subjects. Ministers, diplomats, princes and courtiers had all come to pay their respects to him, and there had been assemblies and receptions every night in celebration of his longed-for return. Free from the onerous customs of the English court, the King had been a changed man. ‘His Majesty dines and sups constantly in public,’ one visitor to Hanover reported. ‘The court is very numerous, and its affability and goodness make it one of the most agreeable places in the world.’ His two years in England seemed little more than an unpleasant dream. Lord Peterborough, who was among the guests at Herrenhausen, noted that the King was so happy that he believed he had ‘forgotten the accident which happened to him and his family on the 1st August 1714’.8

  But all good things come to an end, and it was with the bitterest regret that George reluctantly departed from Hanover in order to resume his royal duties in England. The frequent reports he had received about his son’s increasing popularity prompted him to do so, and also exacerbated his already sour temper upon his arrival at St James’s. The simmering resentment that had long existed between the King and the Prince of Wales was now on the verge of breaking out into open hostility. Any pretence at civility was abandoned, and they barely acknowledged each other in public.

  The political malcontents at court were quick to seize upon this opportunity to further their ambitions, and worked hard to widen the gulf between father and son. Within a few months of the King’s return, the carefree summer at Hampton Court seemed a distant memory, and the court was now beset with tension and suspicion. The King was desperate to escape these troubles by returning to Hanover, but his ministers warned him of the danger of doing so in view of the Prince’s growing influence and popularity. At length they persuaded him to stay in England and launch a summer of such lavish entertainment at Hampton Court that it would eclipse his son’s of the previous year and thereby bolster his own public image. George duly made his way there in July 1717, accompanied by the Prince and Princess.

  The King was far from being a lively and genial host, but he cast aside his natural reserve and entered into a full round of social engagements. He progressed to chapel every Sunday in full state, watched by the crowds of people who had travelled back to the palace once more. So many were there, in fact, that one contemporary lamented that London was ‘now very empty since the Royal Family went to Hampton Court, where the public manner in which the King lives, makes it the rendezvous not only of the Ministers and great men but of the people of all ranks and conditions’.9

  Despite his hatred of the custom, George I dined in public every Thursday, and held balls, dancing and other elaborate entertainments almost every day. As a deliberate snub, he excluded his son from these occasions, but he seemed to have a genuine affection for his daughter-in-law and invited her along to many of them. Caroline’s physical charms were certainly not lost on him, and he was openly flirtatious, sometimes overstepping the bounds of decency with his lewd remarks. When she rebuffed his advances, he effected frustration and called her ‘cette diablesse Madame la Princesse’, but kept up his attentions to her all the same. This reduced the Prince to paroxysms of rage, and it was clear to everyone at court that a breach of monumental proportions was brewing.

  George I had made a valiant attempt to create a vibrant court life at the palace that summer, and for a while it seemed that he would succeed in outshining the Prince’s efforts. But he could not sustain it for long, and by the end of the royal party’s sojourn, he had fallen back into his accustomed ways, shunning society for the company of his mistresses. With characteristic scorn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed: ‘Our gallantry and gaiety have been great sufferers by the rupture of the two courts here: scarce any ball, assembly, basset-table, or any place where 2 or 3 are gathered together. No lone house in Wales, with a rookery, is more contemplative than Hampton Court: I walked there the other day by the moon, and met no creature of any quality but the king, who was giving audience all alone to the birds under the garden wall.’10

  In October 1717, the Prince and Princess returned to St James’s Palace, where the Princess, heavily pregnant once more, began her lying-in. She gave birth to a boy, George William, on 2 November, and as this was the first prince of Hanoverian blood to be born on British soil, it was a cause for great celebration. Ministers, officials, courtiers and household staff, including Henrietta, crowded into the Princess’s bedchamber to offer their congratulations. Even the King, who was still at Hampton Court, expressed his satisfaction and sent his compliments to their Royal Highnesses. But far from leading to a reconciliation between them, the new Hanoverian prince was to be the unwitting cause of an open rupture.

  Upon his return to St James’s, George I enquired into the ceremonies that were traditionally observed at the baptism of royal princes in England. He was informed that the custom was for the King to act as godfather and choose another from the principal lords at court. His gaze alighted upon the Duke of Newcastle, a mean-spirited and obnoxious nobleman whose eccentricities rendered him a laughing stock in polite society. Both the Prince and Princess despised him, but this only increased his suitability in the King’s eyes, and George duly nominated him as the second godfather. The Prince was incensed at this deliberate provocation and immediately demanded that his father retract the offer. But the King was immovable, and ordered preparations to continue as before.

  The christening took place in the Princess of Wales’s bedchamber at St James’s, and according to custom, she remained in bed while the invited guests assembled around her. The tension between George I and his son was palpable, and the guests watched anxiously as the latter visibly struggled to suppress his rage. Henrietta was present, and later described the extraordinary scene that followed to Horace Walpole, who recorded it in his Reminiscences: ‘No sooner had the Bishop closed the ceremony, than the Prince crossing the feet of the bed in a rage, stepped up to the Duke of Newcastle, and holding up his hand and fore-finger in a menacing attitude, said, “You are a rascal, but I shall find you.”’ Unfortunately, thanks to the Prince’s strong German accent and his own very nervous temperament, Newcastle thought he had said ‘I’ll fight you.’ Appalled and confused, he rushed to consult his colleagues at court, and on their advice he went to the King and told him that he had been challenged. George did not wait to ask the Prince for his version of events, but instead took the remarkable step of placing him under house arrest. Henrietta recounted her astonishment when, going to the Princess’s apartments as usual the following morning, she was stopped in her tracks by Yeomen of the Guard who ‘pointed their halberds at my breast, & told me I m
ust not pass’.11

  The court had never known such drama, and the whole of London was agog with excitement. George had already earned a reputation for brutality among the English, who had heard the rumours about the murder of Count von Königsmarck and were now truly shocked that a king should arrest his own son. George called a cabinet, and was rumoured to have told his ministers that if he had been in Hanover he would have known precisely what to do with the Prince, but being in England he was forced to conform to the laws. The cabinet suggested negotiation, and emissaries were duly dispatched to Prince George, who was evidently somewhat unnerved by the incident and wrote letters full of respect for his father. They received no reply.

  The Prince and Princess remained under arrest at St James’s for four days, and Henrietta continued to be refused access to her mistress. The cabinet grew increasingly anxious. Aware of the Habeas Corpus Act, by which no one could be detained without just cause, they tentatively suggested to the King that the Prince’s continued arrest might be regarded as a breach of the law. He grudgingly agreed to release his son, but rather than seeking a reconciliation, he promptly expelled the royal couple from court. In an act of spite, he also insisted that their children remain at St James’s.

  The division in the royal household had dramatic repercussions for Henrietta. She and her husband could no longer continue living together at St James’s and serving their respective masters: a choice would have to be made between marital loyalty and official duty. This choice would have been far more difficult if the Howards had enjoyed any happiness together during their time at the palace. But Charles’s ill treatment of his wife had resumed almost immediately after they had taken up residence there.

  His temper was fuelled by incessant drinking, and he found fault in everything she did. Her clothes were not fine enough, her acquaintances were irksome, her hours of service to the Princess interfered with the time at which he liked to take his meals. When Henrietta sought to remedy whatever caused him displeasure, this merely served to anger him more. In a long and impassioned letter that she wrote to her husband a decade later, she recalled every detail of those miserable days: ‘when under the dread of your resentment I got leave to dine or sup at the hours you liked I then too gave offence & you used to upbraid me with derision yt I was no longer in favour nor my attendance any longer necessary’. As time wore on, Charles’s behaviour grew ever more deplorable, and Henrietta came to live in fear for her life: ‘Your language to me was ye Grossest and most abusing,’ she complained, ‘you have call’d me names and have threatened to kick me and to brake my neck. I have often laid abed with you when I have been under apprehensions of your doing me a mischief and sometimes I have got out of bed for fear you shou’d.’12

  Miserable though Henrietta’s life with Charles had been, it was no easy step to forsake her marriage vows in order to continue in the Princess’s service. Despite the lax morality that existed in the early Georgian court, the laws governing marriage were strict, and a woman was expected to tolerate all manner of ill treatment from her husband rather than risk the shame of separation. Violence, drunkenness and adultery were all too common in marriages, but they constituted insufficient grounds for action. Some women, such as Mary Astell (often hailed as the first English feminist), did speak out against this injustice: ‘To be yok’d for Life to a disagreeable Person and Temper . . . to be denied ones most innocent desires, for no other cause but the Will and Pleasure of an absolute Lord and Master, whose Follies a Woman with all her Prudence cannot hide, and whose Commands she cannot but despise at the same time she obeys them; is a misery none can have a just idea of, but those who have felt it.’13 But such opinions were rarely voiced in the early eighteenth century, and the vast majority of women felt compelled by society and the law to maintain their silence even if faced with the most extreme provocation.

  Desperate to escape her miserable marriage, but equally afraid of destroying her reputation at a time when rumours were already circulating about her friendship with the Prince, Henrietta agonised over what to do. Not trusting any of her friends at court enough to confide in them, she committed her feelings to paper. Charles, she said, had ruled her ‘with Tyranny; with Cruelty, my life in Danger’, and she reasoned: ‘Self preservation is ye first law of nature, are married women then ye only part of human nature yt must not follow it?’ She went on to express views that were astonishingly radical for the time, arguing that women had ‘superiour sense, superiour fortitude and reason’ to men, and therefore questioning ‘how dangerous is Power in womens hands? Do I know so many miserable wives from mans Tyranick power.’ Henrietta knew, though, that reason and justice alone were not enough to protect her reputation if she were to leave her husband, and she ended her soliloquy with a note of despair: ‘his honour is now mine: had I none before I married? Can I devide them? how loose his, and keep my own?’14

  When the Prince and Princess had made the necessary preparations to leave court and Henrietta’s decision could no longer be delayed, she attempted to discuss the matter with her husband in the hope of reaching a compromise. But Charles scorned the very idea that his wife should continue in the Princess’s service, and a furious row ensued. In a show of defiance, Henrietta at once left their apartments without pausing to gather her belongings, and went with all haste to join her mistress.

  Consumed with rage, Charles sent a message to her saying that he no longer considered her his wife and ordering the removal of her possessions from their apartments. Henrietta calmly complied with his wishes and sent a servant to carry out the task. Although she apologised for the ‘impertinent’ things she had said in the heat of the moment, she made it clear that her decision to leave was final. The thought of returning to her husband, whose punishment of her disobedience was bound to be severe, was now completely abhorrent to her. It was in vain that she reasoned with him to ‘give me leave with the greatest submission, to desire you will reflect, upon all our former way of living, and those unhappy circumstances we have been in; and judge if the prospect of returning to that must not be very Terrible to me’.15

  Furious at his wife’s continued defiance, and egged on by the King, who was determined to make life difficult for his son and daughter-in-law, Charles wrote again to demand that she return to him, threatening to resort to the law if she refused. ‘The unparalell’d treatment of your behaviour to me, has twice endanger’d my ruine; and since I find you persevere in your defiance to my recalling you home again, send this to acquaint you, what I am determin’d to do; I have consulted (I beleive) as good opinions for your comeing to me, as I know you have lately done to support the Contrary, and depend upon it I will put them in execution; therefore tis left to your Choice, forceing me to those measures, or avoiding them by Compliance; if you have any sense of Virtue left, or reflexion of reason, you shall find better treatment from me, then I am sure you must in your self be convinced you can deserve; but if this meets any farther denyal, I will immediately take such methods, as the Law prescribes in Your Case.’16

  At the mention of legal action, Henrietta shrewdly changed tack and affected astonishment that Charles was demanding her return when he had ‘expressly abandon’d me and dismiss’d me from living any more with you’. She added, with perhaps more conviction than she felt: ‘I have but too good reason to fear worse treatment than I believe the law of England allowes, and in such cases I have always heard a wife is protected.’17 Her refusal to give in to Charles’s bullying won her the support of the Princess, in whose service she remained, free at last from her husband’s tyranny.

  But freedom had come at a price. Just as the King had retained the Prince and Princess’s children at court, so Charles insisted that their young son Henry must stay with him. Worse still, he forbade Henrietta from visiting him, despite all her entreaties, and resolved to raise the boy to despise her. He could not have exacted a crueller revenge upon his wife’s first act of defiance.

  Chapter 7

  ‘These fools may ne�
�er agree’

  * * *

  THE QUARREL IN THE royal household spawned a rush of ballads, pamphlets, reports and gossip. News of it had quickly spread throughout the court, and it was now the most popular topic of conversation in taverns and coffee houses across London. The people were at turns astonished and amused by this extraordinary occurrence, and it did little to enhance the popularity or prestige of the House of Hanover. One contemporary verse ran:

  God grant the land may profit reap

  From all this silly pother,

  And send these fools may ne’er agree

  Till they are at Hanover.

  The Jacobites seized upon the controversy as yet another example of the Hanoverians’ unsuitability for rule, and stirred up ill feeling across the country. The King’s ministers urged him to make peace with the Prince of Wales, but he would have none of it. The division between father and son had been widening for many years, and would not be easily healed.

  Following their expulsion from court, the Prince and his wife sought temporary shelter in the home of his Chamberlain, Lord Grantham, on Albermarle Street, Piccadilly. It was humiliating for the royal couple to be thus forced to turn to a servant, and quite where they would go after that was still uncertain. Together with their household staff and Maids of Honour, many of whom were weeping, they made a sorry procession on that cold November night. A confidential report contained within the papers of Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland, described how the Princess, who was still recovering from the birth of her son, in ‘the utmost grief and disorder’ swooned several times. The Prince was equally distraught, and cried nonstop for two hours.1