Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  It’s quite a maudlin letter, but in her defense, not only was the baroness in love, but she was hormonal. Lady Grosvenor was seven months pregnant with her second child. Her behavior was doubly scandalous because wellborn women of the era did not venture out during such an advanced stage of their condition.

  The lovers’ lack of caution came back to bite them. After Countess D’Onhoff proved just as willing as any chambermaid to sell her secrets about the couple’s shenanigans, Cumberland dispatched his aide-de-camp Captain Foulkes on a reconnaissance mission for another love nest. Foulkes was commanded to visit a milliner’s shop within spitting distance of Cumberland House for the purposes of inquiring of its forty-five-year-old widowed proprietress, Mary Reda Vemberght, whether she had a spare room or two that might be available.

  Eighteenth-century milliners often had a less savory (but probably more lucrative) profession moonlighting as procuresses; and many courtesans began their horizontal careers as lowly milliners’ assistants. Using two of Mrs. Vemberght’s friends as go-betweens so that nothing could be traced directly back to the lovers, the duke and Lady Grosvenor rented the rooms above the millinery. Probably because her palm was crossed with silver, Mrs. Vemberght would later testify on Lord Grosvenor’s behalf that she “supposed it was for something bad, that it was for girls” (referring to Captain Foulkes’s inquiry about the availability of her rooms). However, she had cheerfully rented them at the time without bothering to ask any questions.

  On June 7, 1769, Lady Grosvenor gave birth to another son. The randy duke was prevented from seeing his lover for a month owing to the customary postpartum lying-in. During Henrietta’s confinement Cumberland was sent to sea for six weeks. From the captain’s quarters of the aptly named Venus he penned copious (and rather puerile) love letters to his own Venus, Lady Grosvenor. When he’d first received his orders, the duke confessed to Mrs. Vemberght that he had no idea how he should survive at sea without his inamorata. The milliner later testified that Henry “cried very much and seemed almost distracted,” and “said he should die” if she didn’t deliver his billets-doux to her ladyship.

  During his month and a half aboard the Venus, the duke sent more than thirty packets of correspondence through his porters, and Mrs. Vemberght was compelled to devise clever methods of sneaking them into Grosvenor House. Letters were secreted inside of bandboxes; and Henrietta’s two sympathetic sisters, one of whom was a maid of honor to Queen Charlotte, were pressed into service as couriers.

  In a gross dereliction of duty, the duke, who by virtue of his rank was in command, ordered Admiral Barrington of the Venus not to sail because if they embarked on their mission to perform the required naval maneuvers in the English Channel, it would have kept him too far from shore to maintain communication with his mistress. With colossal smugness, Cumberland told Lady Grosvenor, “The wind was not so contrary but we could have sailed,” although he informed Barrington that he “had dispatches of consequence to send to London,” keeping the Royal Navy waiting while he commandeered a fast-moving frigate to carry his love letters to her. Never much of an intellect, he ungrammatically added: Indeed, my dear Angel, I need not tell you I know you read the reason too well that made me do it, it was to write to you, for God knows I wrote to no-one else nor shall I at any other time but to the King.

  In one letter to Henrietta, the duke shared the denouement of a blue dream he’d had: I then lay down and dreamt of you . . . [I] had you on the dear little couch ten thousand times in my arms kissing you and telling you how much I adored you and you seemed pleased but alas when I awoke I found it all delusion, nobody but myself at sea. . . . I shan’t forget you. God knows you have told me so before—I have your heart and it lies warm in my breast . . . thou joy of my life, adieu.

  He also enclosed a love poem he had written to her.

  This correspondence had been couriered to Lady Grosvenor by Caroline Vernon, her sixteen-year-old sister. Caroline was tremendously sympathetic toward an older sister trapped in a miserable marriage to a whoring reprobate and was vicariously giddy about the clandestine love affair and the fairy-tale romance transpiring before her. But just as the sisters were in the middle of reading the duke’s letters, they were surprised by Lord Grosvenor himself.

  The baron demanded the paper his wife was holding. Naturally, she refused to relinquish it. A comical scene ensued in which Caroline tried to pull his lordship away from her sister, who was still holding the letter; Lord Grosvenor and Caroline scuffled, and the baron eventually overpowered his teenage sister-in-law and grabbed the love note from Henrietta. With a glance at his spouse that was so chilly it could freeze beer he left the room without another word.

  Grosvenor had a copy made of the duke’s letter to his wife, keeping the original as well. He began to intercept Cumberland’s correspondence, sending it to be copied, as he calmly built a case against the duke and Lady Grosvenor. To make sure his legal complaint would be airtight he shunned both her presence and her bed. As he paid the servants’ salaries, they were quite forthcoming with information regarding Henrietta’s daily routines and had no qualms about spying on her. Eager to make a few extra bob off his lordship, even coachmen in the employ of others were quick to offer their services as anonymous informers.

  As the days wore on, Henrietta’s panic increased: How much did her husband know about her royal affair? The edgier she grew, the more placid he appeared. The baron lulled his wife into a false sense of security, deliberately leading her to conclude that he was ignorant of anything more than the contents of the letter he had so unceremoniously snatched from her hands. After the dustup in the drawing room she had even written to the duke to inform him that her husband was “rather in better temper today, so I’m in great hopes he did not get enough of the letter to make out much.” However, Lord Grosvenor was making his plans to get rid of her. Witnesses were identified and their statements taken. The following year, their depositions were published in a pamphlet; chock-full of lurid details, it became an immediate bestseller.

  With each additional letter, Lady Grosvenor further incriminated herself. On June 19, 1769, she wrote to her lover regarding her latest subterfuge to avoid accompanying her husband to the country: I’ve already complained I’ve a pain in my side and I intend to say it’s much worse at the end of the month and that I cannot bear the motion of a carriage. . . . At the end of five or six weeks I’ll grow very ill and send for Fordyce the apothecary and make him send me a quantity of nasty draughts which I’ll throw out the window. Only think how wicked I am, for in reality I’m already as strong and well as ever I was in my life.

  But in order to have a valid cause of action for adultery, the baron had to catch the lovers literally in flagrante. Passionate correspondence alone would not be enough to convict them, nor would the hearsay of hirelings. The testimony given by people of the lower orders against their social betters, and particularly against a prince of the blood, would never be accepted in court over Cumberland’s word.

  During the last week in October 1769, Lord Grosvenor departed London for Newmarket, leaving his gullible wife with the impression that he was headed there to look at some new horses. Believing herself to be in the clear, the baroness clambered into the luxurious (and distinctive) family coach and set out via a circuitous route for Cheshire, a borough that her husband had represented as an MP, and where the Grosvenors always spent the two months before Christmas at the baron’s estate, Eaton Hall.

  Cumberland’s carriage took the same roads, sometimes directly shadowing Henrietta’s, sometimes deliberately falling behind in order to maintain a discreet distance, and at other times overtaking them and speeding on ahead to the agreed-upon rendezvous point.

  Because he had become so recognizable thanks to the caricatures in print shops, the duke traveled incognito. But his attempts at disguise, straight out of a comedy by Goldsmith or Farquhar, were so outlandish that they would have been laughed off the most provincial stage in the kingdom. Depending on the
coaching inn, Cumberland pretended to be either a farmer or a Welshman, although he hadn’t the remotest bit of familiarity with either identity. At one inn, it perplexed the proprietor all the more that the purported Welshman spoke French to his dinner companions.

  Henry and his entourage called even more attention to themselves in their endeavors to conceal their features. With their heads swathed in scarves, broad-brimmed hats shading their eyes, and sporting huge curly wigs and greatcoats—which were a favorite get-up of the duke’s—they looked and behaved so suspiciously that at several of their layovers the innkeepers’ staffs were certain they were cutpurses, cardsharps, or highwaymen.

  Cumberland and Henrietta had made a plan: They would rendezvous at various locations along the way, and whoever was the first to arrive would mark their door with chalk so that the other lover could request an adjacent (and, if possible, adjoining) chamber. Lady Grosvenor was also traveling with her children (and, presumably, their nurse) and was careful to ensure that their rooms would in no way interfere with her plans for a nocturnal tryst.

  Having arrived at Eaton Hall, the baron maintained his naive demeanor vis-à-vis his wife’s extramarital affair. He put her off the scent by feigning an intense interest in the breeding lines of various horses. Lady Grosvenor was either too self-absorbed, too clueless, or too much in love to catch on. Her letters to the duke prove that she genuinely thought she’d duped her husband into thinking the liaison had been severed. However, Grosvenor knew otherwise, thanks to voluable, and bribable, servants, in addition to tips from a certain anonymous coachman who informed Lord Grosvenor that the duke had been seen in the area affecting various ludicrous disguises. The baron, however, was already aware that Cumberland had been meeting Henrietta in the nearby fields and country lanes.

  In mid-November 1769, Lord Grosvenor ordered his butler, Matthew Stephens, to intercept Henrietta’s letters and copy them. The baron made a big charade out of departing for his neighboring estate, leaving his wife with the impression that she would have Eaton Hall all to herself. On December 5, she hastily scribbled a note to her royal lover: The best thing we can do now is to make him believe it is all over between us, and we really have, I believe, blinded him for some time.

  With supreme self-confidence, she added, At least he has no proof about us and I hope to God that by degrees his suspicions will be lulled and then we may form some plans for meeting happily. . . .

  Because Henrietta’s sister Caroline was a maid of honor to Queen Charlotte, she began to be of two minds regarding the whole affair. Aware of the baron’s rampant debauchery and Henrietta’s unhappiness over his flagrant infidelity, at first Caroline had been supportive of her sister’s romantic royal escapade. However, if the baroness was caught in flagrante with Cumberland, Caroline would lose her position at court and with it the other perks she could ill afford to part with: a salary, her housing, and the opportunity to meet and marry a courtier. Consequently, her sympathy began to wane. She warned Henrietta that the queen and the dowager princess (mother to the king and Cumberland) were none too happy about her adulterous liaison with the duke. On the assumption that any royal anger directed at her older sister would jeopardize her own status, Caroline melodramatically urged Henrietta to end the affair.

  . . . could my simple advice be of any service to you I would implore you on my knees, nay serve you as a slave night and day, that you would for ever banish from your thoughts them whom you style your “Friend. . . .”

  However, given the level of espionage going on at Eaton Hall at the time, it’s possible that Henrietta never received Caroline’s letter.

  On December 14, 1769, Grosvenor made a point of ostentatiously announcing that he was going to stop at Newmarket before returning to London. His wife, predictably, fell for the ruse. So did her royal paramour. Cumberland sent Henrietta a letter under his new nom de plume, “R. Trusty”—a name that might as well have been lifted out of a popular sentimental comedy.

  It appeared that they’d have a window of trysting time in London, owing to the baron’s absence; so the illicit lovers decided to set out for the capital immediately, planning to rendezvous at the bustling White Hart inn in St. Albans. Repeating their modus operandi from their October meeting at the White Hart, they took connecting rooms on the first floor of the coaching inn. But while Lady Grosvenor was downstairs in the dining room, her husband’s butler, Matthew Stephens, drilled a pair of peepholes in the door to her room.

  Sometime after Henrietta returned to her chamber, Stephens brought her a warm drink. He wasn’t being solicitous; he was verifying that she would be in the room when the time came to spring his employer’s trap. In fact several of the baron’s servants were on hand to witness the moment Lord Grosvenor had been anticipating for several months—catching his wife in a compromising sexual position with the Duke of Cumberland.

  Just as the baron’s hirelings had hoped, Henry made a guest appearance in Lady Grosvenor’s room. But in true comedy-of-errors style, no one had checked ahead of time to ensure that the peepholes would afford the proper line of vision to the bed, or that the bed had been positioned to provide the requisite view. Consequently the passion posse overheard all the telltale signs of lovemaking, but couldn’t see a thing! They would therefore be unable to give the baron the proof he required in order to secure his divorce. Stephens finally became so frustrated that he enlisted the aid of his fellow witnesses to batter down the door.

  The ensuing scene owed more to French farce than British bedroom comedy. First, the lovers heard the lock give way, allowing them enough of a head start to hastily clothe themselves. As the door flew open, the countess was desperately endeavoring to button up her robe, a type of dressing gown known as a Jesuit dress. She tried to find a corner of the room in which to hide, but tripped over her own skirts. Meanwhile, Cumberland, fumbling with the buttons of his cream-colored waistcoat, bolted for the door to the adjoining room, but his path was blocked by Matthew Stephens and his brother, who were brandishing the hot pokers from the fireplace.

  Subterfuge soon took a backseat to impertinence. “Do you know who I am?” the duke hotly demanded of the witnesses. Despite his amorous exertions, he was still wearing the ridiculous curly black wig that would not have looked out of place on Charles II. Nevertheless, the baron’s servants immediately replied to his question, stating that he was “His Royal Highness, the Duke of Cumberland.”

  For some reason, it wasn’t the answer Henry had been expecting. In a moment worthy of a Monty Python sketch, the duke hastily backpedaled, insisting that “he was not in her ladyship’s bedchamber, and that he would take his Bible oath on it.” Cumberland’s equerry, a personal attendant with clearly more brains than his employer, advised him to just shut up and leave the room.

  At this point Matthew Stephens ordered the inn’s servants to examine the bed, which was described by Lord Grosvenor’s underbutler, Robert Betton, as “being much tumbled from top to bottom, in a very extraordinary manner, all the bedclothes being much rumpled.”

  The duke returned to Cumberland House to await the inevitable lawsuit for crim. con. (the abbreviation of “criminal conversation,” which was the legalese euphemism for adultery). Lady Grosvenor, her reputation in tatters, couldn’t possibly go home anymore, and so she rented anonymous lodgings for herself and her children.

  But shortly before Christmas, the newspapers printed the allegation that “an assignation at the White Hart at St. Albans between L____ G____, and a certain great D____e, was disconcerted by my Lord’s gentleman.”

  The “great D____e” was the Duke of Cumberland, whose amorous plans were “disconcerted” or disrupted; and of course L____ G____ was Lady Grosvenor. And on March 1, 1770, three months after the duke and his inamorata were discovered in flagrante, Lord Grosvenor brought a lawsuit against his wife in Doctors Commons, the consistory or ecclesiastical court. The Doctors Commons had the power to annul a religious marriage, if grounds for such annulment could be proved. However, t
hey could not grant a civil divorce, which was usually what a petitioner with an adulterous spouse would have been seeking, in order to enable him to remarry. All that Lord Grosvenor could achieve through this lawsuit was a legal separation. But it was a carefully planned and calculated first step.

  The libel against Lady Grosvenor that was filed by the baron’s lawyers, Parthington and Garth, was a masterstroke of fiction in its depiction of her famously lecherous husband as “a man of sober, chaste, and virtuous life” who “always behaved towards his lady with true love and affection and did all in his power to render her completely happy.” Her ladyship, on the other hand, was characterized as “unmindful of her conjugal vow, and not having the fear of God before her eyes. . . .” Further, that “moved and instigated by the devil [she] did contract and carry on a lewd and adulterous conversation with His Royal Highness [Prince Henry] Frederick. . . .” The baron therefore demanded a divorce “from the said Henrietta Lady Grosvenor his wife, because of adultery.” It was an effort to publicly humiliate her, and if Grosvenor got his desired verdict it could be the first step toward a parliamentary divorce, enabling both parties to remarry. Divorces were exceptionally rare in eighteenth-century Britain. In general, only peers received them, and in almost every case it was the husband who petitioned to be rid of his wife.

  One witness who offered damaging testimony against Cumberland during the libel trial in Doctors Commons was the ersatz Countess D’Onhoff. She told the consistory court of Doctors Commons that she had interrupted the illicit lovers in the act, right on her drawing room sofa, adding that the duke’s breeches were down around his knees and that Lady Grosvenor had spread her petticoats in anticipation of his penetration.