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

by Tracy Borman

  Whether it was due to the Queen’s tactics or George’s own inclinations, Henrietta’s relationship with him was visibly deteriorating within a few short weeks of the Coronation. He was impatient with her in public, and although he continued his evening visits with the same clockwork regularity as before, he seemed to derive little pleasure from them. Rumours of a rift began to spread beyond the court, and soon even her friends in the country heard of it. Henrietta tried to play them down by saying that the King’s coldness towards her was due not to a decline of his affection but rather to his natural shortness of temper, which he displayed with many other people at court. But this only served to make her friends more suspicious that something was badly wrong between them. ‘I very much applaud your discretion on retiring when-ever you beheld the clouds gather,’ wrote Lady Hervey from Ickworth, ‘but I own I suspect you of bragging when you tell me of avoiding the sunshine; to my certain knowledg that is a precaution that has long been unnecessary, so indeed my dear madam that sun had not darted one beam on you a great while, you may freeze in the dog days for all the warmth you’ll find from our Sol.’7

  Henrietta’s company and conversation, which had previously been so diverting for the King, seemed to be an increasing source of irritation, and he began to find fault in everything she did. On one occasion, a year after the Coronation, she unwittingly said something to cause offence when they were walking together in the gardens at St James’s. This met with such a furious rebuke from the King that she feared she had been dismissed altogether. ‘I beg to know . . . how soon it will be agreeable to you that I leave your famely,’ she wrote to him afterwards, ‘for with the utmost respect permitt me to say; that from your Majesty’s behaviour to me, it is impossible not to think my removal from your presence must be most aggreable to your inclinations.’ She was clearly still perplexed as to what had sparked his fury, and pleaded: ‘as I am very sensible that I am under your displeasure, so I am intirely ignorant in what manner I have incurr’d it’. In desperation, she tried to win back his favour by stressing the longevity of their attachment and her unswerving loyalty to him throughout it. ‘Were I allow’d to pursue the same way in thinking of your Majesty that I have for fourteen years past; I shou’d then think it impossible that such a tryfle cou’d wear out the remembrance of a fourteen year attachment with unwearied duty, and respect for you.’8 She evidently succeeded on this occasion, and the King gave no indication that he wished to discontinue her as his mistress.

  The courtiers who seized upon the King’s increasing display of short temper with Henrietta as a complete loss of favour were either misguided or mischievous. The source of most of these rumours can be traced back to Lord Hervey, who despite being married to Henrietta’s close friend Molly, was very firmly in the Queen’s camp and therefore always quick to discredit her rival whenever he had the opportunity. George had retained Henrietta as his mistress for almost a decade, which was longer than any of his previous mistresses. What was more, he had continued to spend a great deal of time with her – between three and four hours every evening, as well as occasional meetings in the day – during most of which the couple had been alone together. It should not, therefore, be too surprising that once the novelty of the situation had worn off, and any initial burst of passion had cooled, the King was more inclined to display his natural short-temperedness with her. Indeed, the Queen, whom he undoubtedly loved very deeply, had been the subject of his wrath on numerous occasions, and he had often reduced her to tears in front of the whole court. The ebbs and flows of this choleric little man’s humour should not, therefore, be taken as reliable proof of which way his affections lay.

  Nevertheless, even a temporary loss of favour was unsettling for Henrietta, who still relied heavily on her position at court to save her from ruin. This was therefore the worst possible moment for her estranged husband to begin a fresh onslaught.

  Charles Howard had been put out of his place upon the death of George I, and as a result was now more desperate for money than ever. His brother Edward was still pestering him for the £1,200 that he had agreed to pay him each year as part of their recent court settlement. Added to this were the spiralling debts that he was accruing from his expensive habits. As was his custom, rather than seeking to pay these off through honourable means, Howard chose to persecute his wife until she would agree to give him the money he needed.

  Like so many others at court, Charles believed that now Henrietta was mistress to a king rather than a mere prince, she would be in a much better position to assist him. He therefore renewed his campaign against her with even greater vigour than before. This time, he had no patience for putting his demands in writing: his wife had proved that he was no match for her when it came to reasoned and protracted debate. Neither was he prepared to use the law or the Church to further his cause, as both had proved inadequate in the past. Instead, he opted for a far more peremptory (and familiar) course of action: violence.

  Late one night, after the court had retired, he forced his way into the inner courtyard of St James’s and shouted his demands so loudly that the whole palace was woken from their slumbers. Before the guards could seize him, he broke into the royal quarters and succeeded in reaching the apartments of the Queen herself. Startled by this sudden intrusion, she demanded to know what Howard’s business was. Unabashed, he told her that he would have his wife leave her service and return to him at once. He added that if he was not permitted to do so that very night, then he would seize Henrietta from Her Majesty’s coach the next time the royal family ventured out.

  Caroline was not a woman to be cowed by such threats, and retorted that he might ‘do it if he dare’. For all her bravado, however, she was clearly alarmed at being alone with such a notoriously volatile man as Howard, and later confessed to Lord Hervey: ‘I was horribly afraid of him . . . all the while I was thus playing the bully. What added to my fear upon this occasion . . . was that I knew him to be so brutal, as well as a little mad, and seldom quite sober, so I did not think it impossible that he might throw me out of the window.’ Anxious for her own safety, she edged closer to the door so that she might make her escape if he became violent. Feeling more secure, she told him very firmly that she would neither force his wife to go to him if she had no mind to it, nor keep her if she had. Charles retorted that he would apply instead to the King, which irked Caroline so much that she told him to save himself the trouble ‘as I was sure the King would give him no answer but that it was none of his business to concern himself with my family’.9 At this point, the palace guards burst into the room and removed Howard by force.

  Henrietta was mortified when she heard of the incident. Anxiety that it would exhaust what little patience the King had left with her combined with terror that her husband would strike again. The bitter irony of her situation was not lost on her. As Lord Hervey neatly put it: ‘A husband ordered her home who did not desire to have her there, and a lover was to retain her who seemed already tired of keeping her.’ It was an intolerable position to be in, and the part that she now had to act was ‘equally extraordinary, difficult and disagreeable’.10

  In desperation she abandoned her customary discretion and poured out all her fears and torment in a letter to her old friend Alexander Pope. He was so aghast upon receiving this that he wrote back to her by return of post, offering all the words of comfort and support that he could think of. ‘I do not Only Say that I have a True Concern for you: Indeed I feel it, many times, very many, when I say it not. I wish to God any method were soon taken to put you out of this uneasy, discomforting situation.’ Although it must have seemed an unlikely prospect to him, he urged his friend to take comfort from the thought that her husband’s outrageous behaviour might turn their son against him, and thereby make him reflect that ‘possibly his Mother may be yet worse used than himself’. But Pope knew Mrs Howard well enough to realise that all this must be having a devastating effect upon her. ‘You, that I know feel even to Delicacy, upon several triffling o
ccasions, must (I am sensible) do it to a deep degree, upon one so near & so tender to you.’11

  His fears were realised, for within a matter of days the sorry affair had taken its toll on his friend’s health. She was struck down with such violent pains in the head that she was forced to take to her bed for several weeks. Even after she returned to her duties in the Queen’s household, the headaches continued to plague her. ‘I have been in the most exquisite [pain] for many days,’ she wrote to Chesterfield in the Hague, ‘which left so sensible a feeling for some weeks that I could attend to nothing else.’ Frustrated by his inability to help her from such a distance, the Earl tried to lift her spirits with a series of witty letters on the subject of her illness. ‘I can’t help being very angry at your head for having given us both so much pain,’ he wrote. ‘I have known some Ladys heads very troublesome to others but at the same time very easy to themselves; yours is just the reverse.’ Henrietta was still suffering the after-effects of her illness the following summer, and Dr Arbuthnot wrote to express his anxiety that she had not fully recovered.12

  These were miserable times for Henrietta, worn down as she was by ill health and frustrated by the confinement that Charles’s threats made necessary. The King’s obvious impatience with her and the Queen’s skilful manipulation of them both had turned her life at court into a relentless ordeal. Added to this was the knowledge that Marble Hill – the source of so much joy and hope just a few months before – now stood empty and unfinished. Even if she had had the money to complete it, she could not risk leaving the safety of the court and settling there, because she was bound to fall straight into her husband’s hands.

  Thwarted by the guards at St James’s and by his wife’s powerful protectors at court, Argyll and Ilay, from forcing his way into Henrietta’s presence, Charles resorted to tormenting her with letters and messages. One evening, when she was with her friends Gay and Arbuthnot in her apartments at St James’s, their light-hearted conversation was rudely interrupted by a messenger from her husband. He announced that he had come to secure Henrietta’s agreement to pay Charles’s brother the annual sum of £1,200, and that as he was due to dine with his master later that evening, he required her immediate response. At turns embarrassed and angered by this intrusion, she told him that she would not meddle in anything that related to the brothers’ agreement about the Suffolk estate. The man pressed her further, however, saying that as well as the £1,200, her husband demanded that she settle the interest from her £4,000 inheritance on their son. Henrietta knew full well that doing so would be as good as handing it over to Charles himself, and absolutely refused. She added that she had ‘starv’d with Mr H, & would not put herself in a circumstance to starve without him’. To this, the messenger responded that his master had ‘not above four hundred a year’. Henrietta threw back that she had ‘not many times, while with him, known where to get four hundred pence’.13

  This incident threw the misery of Henrietta’s situation into sharp relief. Not since the early days of her marriage had she felt so trapped. She confided to her lawyer and close friend, James Welwood, that she found it utterly impossible ever to live with her husband again, but equally so to resign her position at court, ‘which service defends me from that poverty and want and that more insoportable misfortune of being illtreated’.14 Feeling increasingly isolated at court, and being perpetually tormented by her husband, Mrs Howard began to consider taking the radical and, for the time, shocking step of suing for a legal separation.

  In the early eighteenth century, marriage was very much considered to be for life. Except in the most extreme cases, once the wedding vows had been exchanged, there was no going back. Both the law and society forbade it. Contemporary tracts referred to marriage as an ‘indissolvable Knot’, and those women who dared to voice dissatisfaction with their lot were dismissed as vain and ungrateful. ‘The Institution of Marriage is too sacred to admit a Liberty of objecting to it,’ one nobleman warned his daughter. ‘You are therefore to make the best of what is settled by Law and Custom, and not vainly imagine, that it will be changed for your sake.’ The author of ‘The Real Causes of Conjugal Infidelity and Unhappy Marriages’, meanwhile, laid the blame of such troubles firmly at the door of ‘the too great Liberty allowed our Women’.15

  Only a very small number of women dared openly to criticise the unfairness of the situation. Mary Astell was one of the most vocal, and railed against a system in which ‘Wives may be made Prisoners for Life at the Discretion of their Domestick Governors’. But such women were seen as blasphemous troublemakers; the product of too much learning and too little authority. Any man who sided with them was similarly shunned by society. One of these rare types was the author Daniel Defoe, who in 1724 published ‘The Great Law of Subordination’. In this he claimed that ‘the case of women in England is truly deplorable, and there is scarce a good husband now to twenty that merited that name in former times; nor was beating of wives ever so much the usage in England, as it is now’.16

  Domestic violence was wholly disregarded by the law as being sufficient grounds for separation or divorce: indeed, most men hardly viewed it as grounds for complaint. As late as 1753, the law still dictated: ‘If the wife be injured in her person or her property, she can bring no action for redress without her husband’s concurrence, and in his name, as well as her own.’17 Divorce was in fact such a rare and extreme measure that it took an Act of Parliament to bring it about. From the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, only four divorces were obtained by women, and all involved extraordinary expense, trauma, and – ultimately – disgrace. Even the less extreme legal actions were similarly beset with difficulty. Annulments were so staggeringly unusual that the very word would have been little understood in the context of marriage. Another option was legal separation, but to gain this a female petitioner had to go through the church courts and prove both adultery and life-threatening cruelty.

  There was a third, slightly less problematic, alternative which was to draw up a private deed of separation – in effect, an ‘informal divorce’. This latter option was by far the most common, though compared to the number of women who chose to stay in their miserable marriages, it was still very rare. Again there were powerful social prohibitions against it, and the legal and financial risks were considerable. In most cases, the wife would forfeit any income she might have from real estate, as well as any future earnings or legacies, all her personal property, and – worst of all – custody of any children. Indeed, the most vindictive husbands could claim the right to total control over their children and exclude their wives from even seeing them, let alone influencing their upbringing. Charles Howard was already exercising this right to the full, and there was absolutely no reason to expect that he would change his behaviour if legal action was brought against him. The only way to minimise the risks involved in these informal divorces was to secure the best possible legal representation and draw up a very carefully worded deed of separation.

  Henrietta must have felt that in James Welwood she had the former safeguard, and driven to desperation by her intolerable situation, she instructed him to begin proceedings. Dispatching the letter in secret, she urged him ‘to have some body prepose to Mr H. to Enter into articles’, so that in future ‘it may not be in the power of our Enemies again to Torment us’. She added that as a meeting was both impractical and inadvisable under the circumstances, he must instead write to her with his thoughts on ‘this project of negotiating with Mr Howard for a separation’.18 Perhaps not surprisingly, there is no trace of Welwood’s response in the family papers, but he evidently agreed with his client’s suggested course of action, for he subsequently began preparing the ground.

  Welwood already had Mrs Howard’s own testimony about her marriage, because earlier that year she had written a long and detailed account of it in a letter to her husband, and had wisely kept a copy for herself. It is clear from this that she was already considering legal proceedings at this time. ‘You ur
ge ye marriage Duty which I have perform’d and you have violated,’ she argued. ‘Ignorant as I am I must tell you yt there are circumstances which have at least suspended my Duty towards you who have made marriage an instrument of cruelty and have otherwise broken those laws you now vainly plead.’ The letter ends with a reasoned, but rather inaccurate, claim that through his abusive behaviour he had forfeited any right to use the law against her. ‘I am bound to preserve my life by a law superior to any claim of a husband, and I must tell you yt one who has broke other parts of his Matrimonial vow, has no right to possess himself of his wifes person.’19

  Compelling though this account was, Welwood knew that on its own it was insufficient to prove Howard’s infidelity and violence beyond doubt. For this, he would need to secure testimonies from independent witnesses, which was no easy task. The Howards had been living apart for over a decade, and during the early years of their marriage, Henrietta had been so humiliated by her husband’s drunkenness and womanising that she had done her best to hide their situation from the world. Added to this was the fact that legal separation was so frowned upon that most people would have shied away from getting involved in any way. Thanks to sheer persistence, however, Welwood was eventually able to track down two credible witnesses who were willing to put such considerations aside.

  Mrs Anne Hall and Mrs Anne Cell had been landlady and neighbour respectively to the Howards when they had lived in cheap lodgings in Soho. Their testimonies provided damning evidence against Charles. Both women told of his violence, cruelty and insobriety; that he would often reduce his wife to tears with his harsh words and even harsher actions, and that while he frittered away their money on his sordid habits, she would suffer ‘as poor & as mean a manner as she could possibly be left to live in’. By contrast, Mrs Howard, they said, always behaved in ‘ye most Obliging Courteous & Obedient manner’, and never did anything to provoke or deserve her husband’s ill treatment.20