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

by Tracy Borman

  Edward Harley wrote in astonishment to his brother, who had founded the scheme: ‘The demon of stock-jobbing . . . fills all hearts, tongues, and thoughts, and nothing is so like Bedlam as the present humour which has seized all parties, Whigs, Tories, Jacobites, Papists . . . No one is satisfied with even exorbitant gains, but everyone thirsts for more, and all this founded upon the machine of paper credit supported only by imagination.’ Many gambled their whole fortunes on what they regarded as a sure prospect. The King himself ventured a considerable sum, and Henrietta also wagered some of her modest funds. She was apparently shrewd in her investment, for her friend Elizabeth Molesworth wrote to express ‘the additional pleasure of hearing you have been successfull in the southsea’.1 Fortunes were made overnight, and people who had previously been barred from high society were now welcomed into the most exclusive circles.

  By August 1720, the price of stock had risen almost tenfold. The inevitable crash, when it came, wreaked widespread devastation. Thousands were rendered destitute overnight. Those who had enjoyed a brief glimpse of high society were thrown back into their accustomed orders, and many aristocratic families were ruined. ‘There never was such an universal confusion and distraction as at this time,’ wrote one observer, ‘many are ruined by their boundless avarice.’ Alexander Pope, who had wisely resisted advice to buy some stock a few weeks before, told a friend that the crash had come ‘like a Thief in the night, exactly as it happens in the case of our death’. He had little sympathy for those whose greed had lost them everything. ‘Methinks God has punish’d the avaritious as he often punishes sinners, in their own way, in the very sin itself,’ he wrote. ‘The thirst for gain was their crime, that thirst continued became their punishment and ruin.’2

  Dismay and devastation were rapidly followed by anger and revolt. There was a general cry for the King, the Prince and the government to be made accountable. All the anti-German feeling that had been bubbling under the surface for so long now burst forth in a torrent of protests, propaganda and violence. The German ministers and mistresses were a target for the people’s vitriol, and they were accused of having been bribed with large sums to recommend the project. It was even suggested that the entire royal family should resign and go back to Hanover.

  Ministers urged the King to return to England at once, and he reluctantly agreed. Furious at having his visit so abruptly curtailed, he arrived back in early November. There followed a fierce debate in the House of Lords, during which Lord Stanhope, the chief minister, was accused of being the cause of all the trouble. He was so enraged by this that he fell into a fit and had to be carried home, where he died the next day. The Secretary of State, who was ill with smallpox, went the same way shortly afterwards, and his father, the Postmaster-General, chose to poison himself rather than face the accusations against him. The Hanoverian regime was deep in crisis.

  Out of the debris rose Sir Robert Walpole. Unlike so many of his peers, he had shrewdly sold his South Sea stock at exactly the right moment and had amassed a considerable fortune as a result. This later enabled him to build a lavish new mansion near the Norfolk coast which eclipsed all the aristocratic houses for miles around. Walpole hailed from that county, being the son of a Whig MP, and had soon inherited his father’s passion for politics. Regarded as a ‘violent’ Whig during his undergraduate days at Cambridge, he was first elected to Parliament in 1701, and had risen rapidly through the ranks to become Secretary at War. His fortunes, and those of his fellow Whigs, had declined during the years of Tory supremacy under Queen Anne, but he had been quick to seize the initiative when the Hanoverians had come to the throne.

  Walpole’s coarse manners and vulgar speech were notorious. In parliamentary debates, he was simple and direct, while in private his language was as earthy as any squire’s. Swift said of him: ‘he’s loud in his laugh, and he’s coarse in his jest’, while Chesterfield described him as ‘inelegant in his manners’ and ‘loose in his morals’.3 He enjoyed to the full every pleasure that Georgian England had to offer. He drank deeply, hunted hard and kept at least one mistress. He also played up to his rustic origins by munching little red Norfolk apples to sustain him during long parliamentary debates. The English people loved his vulgarity and plain-speaking, and he in turn understood their hopes and fears, which proved to be one of the most powerful advantages he had over his enemies.

  Walpole’s directness also appealed to the Princess, who knew that he would always tell her the truth, and who shared his base humour. He cultivated her favour by making sure that he attended court regularly, which he rightly perceived was an essential prerequisite to furthering his career. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu recalled that he was fond of the maxim that ‘whoever expected advancement should appear much in public. He used to say, whoever neglected the world would be neglected by it.’4

  With Lord Stanhope dead and the government in crisis, Walpole spied his chance for glory. He ensured that when the ministry was reconstructed, the chief power would reside in his hands. He became, in effect, Prime Minister (Britain’s first), a post that he was to retain for the next twenty years. George I admired him greatly, once telling Caroline that he believed he could ‘convert even stones into gold’, and placed a great deal of trust in him.5 Partly as a result of this, and partly because Walpole had failed to fulfil the promises that he had made at the reconciliation, the Prince disliked him intensely. Disaffected Whigs and Tories therefore flocked in ever greater numbers to Leicester House.

  Chief among these was Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. A fierce opponent of Walpole, Bolingbroke had risen to high office in Queen Anne’s reign, first as Secretary of War and later Secretary of State. He had spent several years in exile on the Continent after the Hanoverians came to power, but was now back at court, eager to stir up trouble for the Prime Minister. Bolingbroke was a somewhat volatile character, given to extremes of behaviour. ‘His virtues and vices, his reason and his passions, did not blend themselves by a gradation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden contrast,’ wrote Lord Chesterfield.6 His quickness of temper and boldness of action contrasted with his lively wit, charm and intelligence. It was no doubt the latter characteristics that attracted Henrietta, and he became a regular guest at her evening parties.

  Bolingbroke was joined by William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, another opponent of Walpole. He had risen to the position of Secretary at War when George I became king, but had resigned this office during the schism of 1717 and had since failed to return to greatness. United in their opposition to Walpole, he and Bolingbroke set up an influential political journal, The Craftsman, which attacked the corruption that it claimed festered in the seats of power. Like Bolingbroke, Pulteney had ‘lively and shining parts’ and a ‘surprising quickness of wit’. He had a particular talent for amusing ballads and poetry, with which he would entertain Mrs Howard and her companions at court.

  Completing the trio was Dr John Arbuthnot, former physician to Queen Anne. He had long moved in Tory circles, and his opposition to Walpole’s regime had found expression in the biting political satires, journals and pamphlets that spilled from his pen. In the society of wits, politicians and courtiers who thronged into the coffee houses of London, he played a central role. But for all that, he was remarkably modest and unassuming, and to his friends he was both generous and loyal. ‘If there were a dozen Arbuthnots in the world I would burn my Travels,’ Swift once declared. Henrietta also valued his friendship highly. They had met some years before when she had first taken up her post in the Princess’s household, and had soon become close friends. Arbuthnot had apartments near hers at St James’s and would attend her whenever she was sick. She had therefore been delighted when he had followed the Prince of Wales to Leicester House after the split of 1717.

  Henrietta’s association with Walpole’s enemies was to drive an even deeper wedge between her and the Princess. But at the same time it won her the respect of the Prince, who delighted in anything that might antagonise the King. With memb
ers of the Opposition finding a warm welcome at Leicester House, the division in the royal household was almost as marked as it had been before the reconciliation, and life for those who served in it once more became a tale of two courts.

  For Henrietta, the trial of serving both the Prince and Princess was starting to take its toll. She began to complain of violent headaches and was sometimes too ill to carry out her duties in Caroline’s household. She also missed her friends Mary Bellenden and Molly Lepel (now Mrs Campbell and Lady Hervey respectively), especially when the court repaired to Richmond for the summer. Without their company, the Lodge was a considerably less diverting place than it had been during the preceding years, and Henrietta’s main source of entertainment was the letters she received from her absent friends. They too longed to be with her: ‘I wich we were all in swiss cantons,’ lamented Mrs Campbell.7

  Henrietta confided her increasing dissatisfaction with life at court to Mrs Campbell, but urged her to destroy the letters in case they should be seized by her enemies. Her friend wrote at once to reassure her: ‘You may be sure I’ll never name you for an author upon several accounts, nor indeed talk of any thing you writ for tis what I detest.’ Their mutual friend, Lady Lansdowne, was also admitted to her confidence. ‘I hope Dear Mrs howard you & I shall Live to see better days,’ she wrote, ‘& love & honour to flourish once more.’8

  Henrietta’s growing aversion to her life at court was not only caused by the lack of close friends nearby. After four years, the Prince’s passion for her seemed to be cooling. Theirs had never been a great love match, but Henrietta was well aware of how fragile her position would be if he rejected her. The first signs of his restlessness can be traced to early in 1722, when her friends observed her to be ‘much in the vapours’. Rumours soon reached Mrs Campbell. ‘I was told before I Left London, that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & crosse & not so good to you as usual,’ she wrote to her friend. As somebody who had also been the subject of the Prince’s affections, Mary was able to empathise with Henrietta’s predicament, and lamented that his coldness ‘betrays the want of that good understanding, that both you & I so often flatter’d ourselves about, but these times I fear is over’.9

  If Henrietta had been growing restless even before this turn of events, she now longed to be free from court. Those of her friends who had already left and found happiness heartily wished that she could do so too. ‘It would make one half mad, to think of mis spent time in us both,’ reflected Mary Bellenden, ‘but I ame happy, & I wou’d to god you were so. I wish . . . that your circumstances were such that you might Leave that Life of hurry, & be able to enjoy those that Love you, & be a little att rest.’

  His sense of timing as impeccable as ever, Charles Howard chose this moment to begin tormenting his wife once more. His premise was the royal reconciliation, which he claimed gave Henrietta even less cause to continue living apart from him. During the five years since she had left St James’s, he had continued to enjoy the sordid pleasures that had diverted him during their life together. In so doing, he had plunged himself still further into debt, and therefore renewed his attempts to secure a greater portion of Henrietta’s fortune than their marriage settlement had allowed him. He wrote to taunt his wife with the news that he was again suing her beloved brother ‘for that Sum [£4,000] I have undergone much vexation’, adding: ‘I desire to know if you will oppose it, and am truly sensible of the folly I committed, in makeing you so Independent of me.’10

  Howard’s letter had the desired effect, and Henrietta at once admitted: ‘to find you have a resentment against my Brother adds to my uneasinesse’. However, she insisted that she no longer had any power over the matter of her £4,000 inheritance. Fearing that he would use their son to blackmail her, she begged him not to ‘Endavour any thing that may hereafter prove a disadvantage to the child,’ adding that when they had lived as man and wife, ‘I and the child [were] put in the fears of starveing through the whole course of our lives’. Her reply only served to ignite Charles’s wrath, and rumours of her renewed marital strife soon began to spread throughout the court. ‘I want to know if mr howard is come to town, & if he is not plagueing you,’ wrote her friend Mary Bellenden, who had heard the news. Henrietta did what she could to limit the damage, urging her husband to keep a cooler head and arrive at ‘a better opinion of me then your present warmeth will admit of’. Given Charles’s notoriously hot temper, this was a vain plea. For the next few months, he continued to slander his wife ‘in ye most inveterate and publick manner too coarse to be repeated and too great to leave the world unamazed’.11

  Assistance came from a rather unexpected quarter. The Prince, tiring of his mistress and impatient with her troublesome husband, offered her a way out of court. He presented her with a gift of stock worth £11,50012, together with ‘a sett of Guilt Plate’, some diamond jewellery, a ruby cross, a gold watch, and all the furniture and furnishings of both her own and her servants’ rooms at Leicester House and Richmond Lodge. He also threw in a shipload of mahogany – a rare and much-prized commodity – which had just arrived in London. For a man notorious for his miserliness, this was an extraordinarily generous gift. That he intended it to buy Henrietta’s independence from her husband was clear in the wording of the settlement, which stipulated that the Prince’s gift was something ‘with which the said Charles Howard shall not have any thing to doe or intermedle’. Instead, she was to ‘use or dispose of the same as she pleases . . . as if she was sole and unmarryed’. Anticipating that she would use the money to buy a house of her own away from court, George made sure that her husband would be unable to touch this either: ‘the premisses soe to be purchased to and ffor the sole proper peculiar and seperate use and Benefitt of the said Henrietta Howard alone and not for the use or benefit of the said Charles Howard her husband’.13

  The Prince was right in his prediction about what his mistress would spend the money on. She had for some time longed to escape court for a home of her own. The previous year, she had confided to her friend Mary Campbell that she was ‘Jealous for Liberty and property’.14 Without the Prince’s gift, this had seemed a distant prospect. Now it was suddenly within her grasp. Overjoyed at her unexpected turn of fortune, Henrietta at once set about making plans to build a house where she could escape the misery of her life at court. The need to keep this a secret was paramount. Even though the terms of the settlement made it nigh-on impossible for her husband to get his hands on the property, he had proved more than capable of making a nuisance of himself on numerous occasions in the past, and would no doubt do so again if he found out that his wife was about to gain her independence. The Princess, too, was eager to retain Henrietta at court for fear that her husband would find a mistress who threatened her own hold over him.

  Henrietta went in secret to seek the help of an acquaintance, Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke. Known as ‘the Architect Earl’, he had grown up at Wilton, near Salisbury, which was believed to be the work of Inigo Jones, the first great British admirer of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Lord Herbert was a patron of Colen Campbell, the leader of the English Palladian revival, and he engaged his protégé in working up some initial designs for Mrs Howard’s villa. These were conveyed in secret to her apartments at Richmond Lodge that summer. She was delighted with this first glimpse of her future retreat, but resisted the temptation to share her excitement with even her closest friends. One day, when she was called to Greenwich unexpectedly, however, she inadvertently left the plans visible in her apartments. It was fortunate that the person who discovered them was a trusted friend.

  John Gay had paid an impromptu visit to Richmond Lodge and, on finding the royal party absent, had repaired to Henrietta’s rooms to wait for her. When she had not returned by the end of that day, he wrote to tell her that he had called, and expressed his curiosity about the plans he had seen. Greatly alarmed, Henrietta wrote to him at once: ‘I beg you will never mention the Plan which you found in my Room. There’s
a necessity, yet, to keep that whole affair secret, tho (I think I may tell you) it’s almost intirely finish’d to my satisfaction.’ Gay assured her: ‘When I hear you succeed in your wishes, I succeed in mine, so I will not say a word more of the house.’15

  Either Gay failed to keep his word, or Mrs Howard’s excitement triumphed over her usual discretion, because before long her project had become one of the worst-kept secrets at court. But if the Princess knew about it, she was, for now, content to indulge her ‘good Howard’ in her ambitious scheme. She was, in any case, absorbed with housing plans of her own, for the Duchess of Buckingham was making overtures to the royal couple that they should lease her house on the west side of St James’s Park. A natural daughter of James II, the Duchess was proud of her Stuart ancestry and rather disdainful of the Hanoverian royal family. The Princess had expressed an interest in the house at a recent court reception, but rather than deal with her directly, the Duchess chose Henrietta as an intermediary. ‘I have express’d my intentions about the house in a way that several perhaps would not,’ she wrote to her, ‘considering the little care and regularity that is taken in the prince’s family.’ The terms she offered were £3,000 per annum to rent the house, or £60,000 to buy it outright.16 This was unacceptable to the royal couple, and the scheme was dropped. However, Buckingham House was to be purchased by the Crown some forty years later, and in the early nineteenth century it was remodelled by John Nash and became known as Buckingham Palace.

  Henrietta’s project, meanwhile, was progressing apace. Having approved the designs, she now sought an appropriate location for her new house. Early in 1724, she instructed her friend the Lord Ilay, who was a trustee of her settlement from the Prince, to purchase some land in an area known as Marble Hill, situated by the Thames at Twickenham.