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

by Tracy Borman

  Another possibility is that she was so proud of her reputation as a ‘Woman of Reason’, the darling of the poets and playwrights of Georgian England, that she did not wish it to be overshadowed by the knowledge that she had borne a royal bastard. This may also explain the ambiguity of her relationship with George. She could have encouraged the notion that it was entirely platonic because she wanted to be known as something more than just a royal mistress. She had long cherished intellectual ambitions and was a fierce critic of women’s subservience to men, so it is likely that her affair with the Prince – while necessary to her advancement – was also something of an embarrassment to her. The truth of this would be borne out by subsequent events.

  The lack of documentary proof to support either theory is frustrating. It is possible that this was destroyed, whether by Henrietta, her family, or the prudish Victorian editor who assembled her correspondence for publication. Or it may be that Henrietta was so successful in hiding the truth from her contemporaries that no evidence ever existed. Given the preponderance of published memoirs and letters from the period, the latter seems more likely. One can hardly imagine Lord Hervey omitting such a piece of scandal from his memoirs if it was known about at court. Whatever the case, the tantalising suggestion of a secret pregnancy adds to the enigma of Henrietta’s character, as well as of her relationship with the Prince of Wales.

  If Henrietta had hoped to gain considerable influence over the Prince through her affair with him, she was to be disappointed. George despised the way that his father was ruled by his two mistresses, Mesdames Schulenburg and Kielmansegg, and was determined not to fall into the same trap. According to her adversary at court, Lord Hervey, Henrietta was deeply embarrassed to be in the position of having all the semblance of power with no capacity to execute it. ‘Notwithstanding her making use of the proper tools, the stuff she had to work with was so stubborn and so inductile that her labour was in vain,’ he observed, ‘her situation was such as would have been insupportable to anyone whose pride was less supple, whose passions less governable, and whose sufferance less inexhaustible.’22

  The Prince was, apparently, under the influence of only one woman, and that was his wife Caroline. She appeared to manage him so expertly that she was able to get her own way without ever seeming to, and soothed his violent fits of temper with apparent compliance and humility. She spent many hours with her husband each day, schooling herself into ‘saying what she did not think, assenting to what she did not believe, and praising what she did not approve’, in order to insinuate her opinions ‘as jugglers do a cord, by changing it imperceptibly, and making him believe he held the same with that he first pitched upon’.23

  Caroline’s skill in manipulating the Prince was well known at court. The ideal wife in Pope’s Of the Characters of Women was based upon her:

  She, who ne’er answers till a Husband cools,

  Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules;

  Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,

  Yet has the humour most, when she obeys.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, meanwhile, claimed that the Princess ‘had that genius which qualified her for the government of a fool’, and that her first thought on marriage had been ‘to secure herself the sole and whole direction of her spouse; and to that purpose counterfeited the most extravagant fondness for his person’.24

  Caroline realised that to win real power, she needed an accomplice in government. Sir Robert Walpole, the chief minister, was the ideal candidate. The two were described as being like ‘leaves on the same twig’. Both were cunning, intelligent, coarse-fibred, full of appetite for life and, above all, had an insatiable lust for power. Their alliance was forged by the knowledge that each was indispensable to the other. Walpole knew that in Caroline lay the real route to influence over the Prince. It was said that he had discovered early on that whatever ‘galantries’ the Prince might indulge in, ‘the person of his Princess was dearer to him than any charms in his Mistresses’. Furthermore, although Henrietta was George’s declared favourite, the wily minister perceived ‘that the power would be lodged with the wife, not with the Mistress’. He therefore disregarded the latter and abstained from joining the throng in her apartments, which won him the lasting respect and trust of the Princess. In paying his court to her, rather than Henrietta, it was said he ‘had the right sow by the ear’.25

  Walpole also appealed to Caroline’s vanity by telling her that he could do nothing without her, and that she was ‘the sole mover of this court; whenever your hand stops, everything must stand still, and whenever that spring is changed, the whole system and every inferior wheel must be changed too’. The Princess was equally aware of how indispensable Walpole was to her plans: the Prince would tolerate advice from a minister, but he would never do so from a woman.

  They were joined in their alliance by Lord Hervey, who was a staunch supporter of Walpole and outspoken in his Whiggish beliefs. In truth, however, it was his wit rather than his politics that really drew Caroline to him. She was delighted by the irreverence of his humour, which did not scruple to make fun of her husband, and the two became so close that there were inevitably scurrilous rumours that they were having an affair. Hervey was as disdainful of George as he was admiring of the Princess, and in his memoirs he portrayed him as an impotent fool who was entirely ruled by his wife.

  The Prince knew people sneered that Caroline governed him, and he hated it. He would do everything possible to prove them wrong, often to the point of humiliating her in front of the entire court, laughing at her ignorance over matters of state or flying into a rage if she dared to voice an opinion that was not his own. The Princess met all of this with ‘the obsequiousness of the most patient slave to the most intemperate master’. She returned every insult with flattery and every contradiction with acquiescence, and ‘with the implicit resignation of the most rigid Christian, whenever he smote one cheek turned the other’.26

  Caroline’s tolerance of her husband’s behaviour extended to his romantic liaisons with her ladies at court. Far from being affronted by his blatant infidelity, she seemed actively to encourage it on the grounds that anything that brought him pleasure was also a source of joy to her. One courtier observed that she was ‘so devoted to his pleasures (which she often told him were the rule of all her thoughts and actions), that whenever he thought proper to find them with other women, she even loved whoever was instrumental to his entertainment’. If the late-eighteenth-century historian William Coxe is to be believed, this was all an act. ‘Never wife felt or lamented a husband’s infidelities more than herself,’ he claimed, arguing that Caroline’s ‘forced complacency’ was only achieved through a ‘violent effort’.27 But it is unlikely that she was suffering any such inner turmoil. Her tolerance almost certainly sprang from a calculated strategy rather than the saintly forbearance that she was so keen to display to the world, for it helped her to manipulate the Prince – provided that the object of his extramarital attentions was sufficiently malleable.

  The Princess had, in any case, been bred to accept infidelity as the natural course of royal marriages. The courts in which she had undergone her royal training had hardly been conspicuous for their morality. Electress Sophia had for years not merely tolerated but welcomed the Countess of Platen as the mistress of her husband. Her daughter, who had married the King of Prussia, had followed the same policy towards his other women. By contrast, the actions of George I’s ill-fated wife, Sophia Dorothea, had provided an example of what not to do. Objecting to his blatant infidelity by taking a lover of her own had earned her a lifetime’s imprisonment at Ahlden.

  If Caroline had been raised a pragmatist in her views of royal marriage, then she also had another reason to accept her husband’s infidelity with a readiness bordering on the enthusiastic. Being obliged to spend ‘7 or 8 hours tête-à-tête’ with him every day was quite a burden, given his choleric temper, tedious conversation and boorish manners. The Princess was therefore only too happ
y to be relieved of his company for a few hours. Moreover, she judged that the mild and compliant Mrs Howard would pose little threat to her own hold over the Prince. ‘Tho’ she was at that time very handsome, it gave her Majesty no jealousy or uneasiness,’ remarked one courtier.28

  But Caroline was not a woman who left things to fate. For all of Henrietta’s apparent modesty, she was still spending three or four hours alone with Prince George every day, and she might well use some of her acclaimed intellect to try to influence his opinions. She was also a magnet for members of the Opposition in government, notably Lord Bolingbroke, the powerful Tory peer who had been dismissed from his position as Secretary of State upon George I’s accession. Some of her literary circle, including Pope and Gay, were also of that party, and used her evening gatherings to discuss affairs of state, as well as to exchange ideas for their poetry and satires. In courting such associates, Henrietta made an enemy of Sir Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whig administration in government and arguably one of the most powerful men in the country. Slowly but surely, two enemy camps began to form at Leicester House: the Whig party led by the Princess and Walpole, and the Tory sympathisers who attached themselves to the Prince of Wales’s mistress. Given Caroline’s clever manipulation of her husband, the former party was clearly in the ascendancy, but as long as Henrietta remained his mistress, she would always be a focus for the Opposition.

  Caroline therefore did everything she could to minimise the risk posed by her rival. She began by using the means that were directly under her control, namely Henrietta’s position in her household. As Woman of the Bedchamber, Henrietta had an array of duties to occupy her time. It was far from being the sinecure that many of the higher-ranking positions constituted. Yet she had so far been treated kindly by Caroline, who seemed to value her as much for her companionship as for her usefulness in the household. All of this was to change when she became the Prince of Wales’s mistress. The Princess was determined that henceforth she would carry out every duty to the letter. Addressing Henrietta with great condescension as ‘my dear Howard’, she began to inflict ever more menial tasks upon her.

  During the ceremony of dressing, it was the job of the Woman of the Bedchamber to hold the basin while the Princess washed. From now on, Caroline insisted that Henrietta perform this task on bended knee. Henrietta tolerated this at first, but as her mistress heaped more and more indignities on her, she rebelled. In a rare outburst of temper, ‘with her fierce little eyes, and cheeks as red as your coat’, she told her mistress ‘that positively she would not do it’. The Princess, who recounted the whole incident to Lord Hervey, answered calmly but firmly, as one would to a naughty child: ‘Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will. Go, go! fie for shame! Go, my good Howard; we will talk of this another time.’29

  Determined not to suffer this humiliation again, Henrietta made enquiries into the exact duties of her role, and called upon precedents to help her. She sought the advice of Abigail Masham, former Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Anne. Unfortunately, Mrs Masham confirmed that the post-holder was indeed required to kneel when holding the wash-basin, so the Princess had been entirely justified in her request.30 What appeared on the surface to be a trivial matter was in fact a major point of principle, and Henrietta knew that henceforth she would have no choice but to submit to the Princess’s requests. Caroline was triumphant and could not resist the opportunity to gloat. ‘About a week after, when upon maturer deliberation she had done everything about the basin that I would have her, I told her I knew we should be good friends again,’ she confided to Hervey, ‘but could not help adding, in a little more serious voice, that I owned of all my servants I had least expected, as I had least deserved it, such treatment from her.’31

  Caroline proved adept at using Henrietta’s position in her household to reinforce her own superiority. That Henrietta had been her Woman of the Bedchamber for some years before the affair began was a distinct advantage, because it meant that the precedent of obedience had already been firmly set. It had been a very different situation for Catherine of Braganza, wife of King Charles II. Upon her arrival in England, she had been dismayed to discover that her husband-to-be had appointed his then heavily pregnant mistress, Lady Castlemaine, as her Lady of the Bedchamber. Catherine had demanded that the appointment be revoked, but Charles had been adamant, insisting: ‘I like her company and conversation, from which I will not be restrained, because I know there is and will be all innocence in it.’ He had later repeated the exercise with another mistress, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. His wife had been unable to hide her distress at this further indignity. ‘This day, the Queen being at dinner, the Duchesse of Portsmouth, as a lady of the bedchamber, came to wait on her,’ observed a bystander at court, ‘which putt the Queen into that disorder that tears came into her eyes, whilst the other laughed and turned [it] into jest.’32

  Caroline’s manipulation of her husband’s mistress was further aided by her knowledge of the latter’s vulnerability. She knew full well that Henrietta’s husband had frittered away their modest fortune on drinking and gambling, and that without her position at court, she would face almost certain ruin. She also knew that Henrietta’s abiding terror was that she would be forced to return to this violent and abusive man, who had subjected her to years of misery before her escape to Leicester House. Moreover, etiquette demanded that no direct reference to the affair could ever be made by two well-bred women, so in theory at least Henrietta’s only role at court was in the Princess’s household. It was in any case uncertain how long the affair would last. All of this gave the Princess a significant advantage over her rival, and she did not scruple to remind her of it whenever possible. After the incident with the wash-basin, Caroline told Henrietta that ‘she knew I had held her up at a time when it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop thro’ my fingers – thus–.’33 Henceforth, she could torment her Woman of the Bedchamber to her heart’s content.

  In examining Prince George’s relationships with Caroline and Henrietta, it seems that there was almost a role reversal between the wife and the mistress. The passion he felt for the former was obvious to everyone at court, and it had diminished little during the thirteen years of their marriage. When he took other women, he delighted in telling Caroline every detail of his conquest: from wooing to sexual technique. He even wrote to her about them, and one letter, describing the seduction of a young woman he met in Hanover, ran to a staggering forty pages. In return, Caroline displayed all the traits of a mistress, by using his passion to further her political ambitions, by putting aside her intellectual tastes to feign enthusiasm for his tedious conversation, and by meeting his fits of temper and rudeness with meek compliance. Above all, she took pleasure in humiliating the woman who was bound to him by duty and convention.

  George’s relationship with Henrietta, meanwhile, was apparently governed more by the clock than by passion, and his primary motivation in taking her as his mistress seemed to be a desire to conform with tradition. If Henrietta’s enemies at court were to be believed, he got little pleasure from their connection and came to resent her as much as he would a tiresome wife. Lord Hervey, who was among them, claimed: ‘She was forced to live in the constant subjection of a wife with all the reproach of a mistress and to flatter and manage a man whom she must see and feel had as little inclination to her person as regard to her advice.’34

  But the Prince was not completely devoid of affection for Henrietta. In his account of events at court, the politician and diarist John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, speculated that it was Henrietta’s ‘good sense and agreeable carriage’ that drew George to her.35 She may not have had his wife’s voluptuous figure, but she was still an attractive woman. When the affair began, she was twenty-nine years of age and was widely admired for her ‘handsome’ and ‘pleasing’ appearance. Her best feature was her long hair, which Lord Chesterfield described as ‘remarkably fine’. Its natural colour was ch
estnut brown, but Henrietta tended to lighten it with dye. This may have been for the benefit of the Prince, whose weakness for blondes was well known at court.

  Henrietta’s fair hair is shown off to great effect in a portrait of her commissioned by Pope. Wearing an elegant low-fronted dress with pearls looped across the bodice, revealing the chemise, she presents an attractive and enigmatic figure. Her skin has a soft ivory hue which contrasts with the deep blue of her eyes, and her steady gaze transfixes the viewer. Her high forehead and long nose make her a striking rather than conventional beauty, but she has a pleasing, dignified appearance that commands interest and respect in equal measure. With one hand raised to her cheek in an apparently contemplative pose, she appears every bit the enlightened philosopher, yet the faint smile that plays about her lips suggests humour and warmth. In another portrait, she is shown in a more formal setting, dressed for a masquerade ball in clothes of the latest fashion. Her slim waist is made narrower still by a stiff-boned corset, and her hair is neatly tucked under a hat, but her dark eyes show an intelligence and independence that no amount of court etiquette can suppress.

  Henrietta’s sense of style was one of her greatest attractions. Horace Walpole said that she was ‘always well drest with taste & simplicity’. At one state occasion, she and her fellow Woman of the Bedchamber, Mrs Herbert, were described as being ‘the two finest figures of all the procession’. She had worn a scarlet dress with a silver trimming and appeared ‘so rich, so genteel, so perfectly well dressed’ that she won the admiration of many onlookers.36