Ordinarily, George II’s affairs had little effect on his wife. Caroline of Anspach was smarter than her husband and prettier than his mistresses. By all accounts, George and Caroline loved each other very much, and were the rare royals to share a bedroom. But often the king came to bed very late, or left the room rather early. The Archbishop of York archly remarked that he “was glad to find her Majesty so sensible a woman as to like [that] her husband should divert himself.”
However, where Henrietta was concerned, the queen could not bring herself to be indifferent. Caroline enjoyed humiliating her waiting women, and took especial care to single out Henrietta. And Henrietta’s royal lover, instead of leaping chivalrously to her defense, joined in the fray. One day while Henrietta was securing a scarf about Caroline’s creamy throat, George yanked it off, cruelly telling his mistress, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the queen’s!” Henrietta somehow endured the torment.
Although Henrietta and Charles were separated when he became Earl of Suffolk in 1731, she was entitled to remain his countess. Henrietta’s new position made her too exalted to remain a Lady of the Bedchamber, so Queen Caroline made her Mistress of the Robes. She was also, of course, still mistress to the king.
Henrietta had staying power, remaining George’s mistress for twenty years. And when the king decided it was time to trade her in for a newer model, there was an outcry at court. Lord Hervey remarked that “one would have imagined that the King, instead of dropping a mistress to give himself up entirely to his wife, had repudiated some virtuous, obedient, and dutiful wife in order to abandon himself to the dissolute commerce and dangerous sway of some new favorite.”
And after two decades of civilly accepting Henrietta’s horizontal position with her husband, the queen voiced her opinion on the matter: George should keep Henrietta. After all, Caroline feared the influence of a new favorite as well. The king was incensed at her meddling. “What the devil do you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me?” he demanded of his wife.
Suffolk died in 1733, and the following year Henrietta lost her position at court. By 1734, George had tired of her, and the queen dismissed her from her service. Henrietta married the Honorable George Berkeley, the son of the Earl of Berkeley, in 1735 and enjoyed the better part of her remaining years at her Palladian estate, Marble Hill, in Twickenham. There, she presided over a glittering literary salon, hosting such notable minds and wits as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope—who wrote a quatrain about Henrietta that encapsulated her effect on the people who loved her: I knew a thing that’s most uncommon
(Envy be silent and attend!)
I knew a reasonable woman,
Handsome and witty, yet a friend.
Henrietta’s second husband died in October 1746; she spent the rest of her life making improvements to Marble Hill and concealing the extent of her debts from her friends. She died there on July 26, 1767, at the age of seventy-eight or -nine.
GEORGE II and Amalie Sophie Marianne von Wallmoden 1705-1765
After Henrietta, George pleasured himself with a bevy of dubious beauties. And Queen Caroline shared her husband’s taste for titillation. Understanding that kings have needs, she occasionally acted as George’s procuress—provided that his lovers were uglier than she was. And when he visited Hanover, he delighted in sharing the graphic details of his amorous exploits in juicy letters home.
During a visit in 1735, the king waxed particularly rhapsodic about Amalie Sophie von Wallmoden, a voluptuous dusky beauty twenty-one years his junior. The daughter of a Hanoverian general, in 1727 Amalie had married the Oberhauptmann of Calenberg, Gottlieb Adam von Wallmoden, whom she bore two children.
It took George thirty pages to tell his wife about his new inamorata’s charms, crowing to Caroline, “I know you will love Madame Walmoden [sic] because she loves me!”
However, the queen’s remarkable tolerance for his affairs evanesced after George hung a full-length portrait of his new mistress directly opposite their marital bed. And in 1736, when he insisted on returning to Germany to visit Madame von Wallmoden, a scamp sent a broken-down nag trundling through the London streets with a placard affixed to its rump advising, “Let nobody stop me. I am the King’s Hanover equipage going to fetch His Majesty and his whore to England.”
George wanted to bring his amorous souvenir home with him; but Caroline was adamantly against it, as were George’s ministers, including Sir Robert Walpole, who feared that a German influence so intimately connected with the king might have a devastating effect on the British government. So George’s lover remained in Germany, and in 1737, he and Caroline patched up their marital differences.
But by November of that year, Caroline was very ill. She’d suffered from gout for years, and that summer had succumbed to an attack of colic. But it was complications that had followed the birth of her last child, Princess Louisa, in 1724, that eventually felled the queen. She lay in agony for a week, and on her deathbed, tearfully asked her husband if he planned to take another wife.
“Non, non, j’aurai des maîtresses,” the sobbing king assured his beloved spouse (“No, no, I shall have mistresses”).
Caroline died on November 20, 1737, at the age of fifty-four. The following June, Madame von Wallmoden arrived in England and was promptly installed as George’s maîtresse en titre. Her husband had accompanied her. But with Amalie playing official hostess and royal concubine, there was clearly no role for him, so he returned to Hanover and divorced her in 1740.
On February 8, 1740, George naturalized Amalie a British subject and elevated her to the peerage, creating her Countess of Yarmouth. She wasted no time setting up shop for the purposes of bribes and influence peddling. After demanding £30,000 (over $6.6 million today) from her royal lover, rather than open the Privy Purse, George gave her permission to choose two candidates for the peerage and pocket a £15,000 bribe from each of them!
On George II’s death in 1760, he left his lover a strongbox containing “about ten thousand pounds” (a little over $2.7 million today), according to Horace Walpole. The king’s dour successor, his grandson, George III, sent her packing back to the Continent, so the Countess of Yarmouth decamped to Hanover, where she died of breast cancer in 1765.
GEORGE IV
1762-1830 REGENT 1811-1820 KING 1820-1830
WHEN GEORGE WAS FIFTEEN YEARS OLD, HIS TUTOR, DR. Richard Hurd, presciently observed, “He will either be the most polished gentleman or the most accomplished blackguard in Europe, possibly an admixture of both.”
After several romances that earned the Prince of Wales an especially notorious reputation as well as a secret marriage on December 15, 1785, to the Roman Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, on April 8, 1795, George married his first cousin, the slatternly and odiferous Caroline of Brunswick. It was a match made only because the king had agreed to pay his son’s debts, which at the time amounted to over £600,000 (nearly $88 million today).
His father, George III, had struggled with bouts of “madness,” which are now believed to have been manifestations of porphyria, a rare metabolic disorder that was most likely passed into the Hanover line through the Stuarts. In fact, George I’s cousin Anne, the last Stuart monarch, is also believed to have suffered from porphyria, though with a less drastic effect on her overall health.
Symptoms of porphyria include discolored urine (often bluish black); abdominal pain; a weakness in the limbs; and mental issues leading to paranoia, derangement, and hysteria (which is why George III’s contemporaries, who knew nothing of porphyria, were certain he’d gone mad).
After it was determined that King George was no longer mentally sound enough to continue to rule, on February 5, 1811, the forty-eight-year-old Prince of Wales was made Regent. George III died on January 29, 1820, and the regent, then fifty-seven, was crowned George IV.
He was one of the most erudite and cultivated of all English monarchs, and a great patron of the arts. The Regency, and later Ge
orge IV’s reign, were characterized by lavish balls and crowded assemblies, and the introduction of that daring new dance from the Continent—the waltz. Often viewed through rosy lenses, the Regency is one of the most popular settings for romance novels, depicted as a kinder, gentler era where manners mattered—the age of Jane Austen’s novels. In fact, Austen was George’s favorite author, so she had no choice but to dedicate Emma to him, although she despised the prince’s shabby treatment of his wife, Princess Caroline of Brunswick.
As Prince of Wales, George was perversely and obstinately in favor of anything his father was against. George III was a staunch Tory; so “Prinny” supported the Whigs. But once he became king, George IV switched allegiances and became a Tory himself, shutting out the very men who had helped his cause when he was floundering in financial and romantic straits. And although the prince had secretly married the Catholic Maria Fitzherbert, he stubbornly refused to grant Catholic emancipation. Politically, there is little in the “credits” column of George IV’s reign, other than his decision as regent to continue to ally with Spain in the Peninsular War against Napoleon.
Unfortunately, George IV had so much promise, but did precious little with it, squandering the public’s goodwill with his lechery and lavish spending, while during his regency and reign soldiers and sailors went unpaid. “Luddite” laborers were threatened with redundancy by machines that sped up, but cheapened, their craft. And in Ireland there were threats of civil war.
Possessing the Hanoverian corpulence, George’s weight matched the size of his ego, swelling to well over three hundred and fifty pounds in his final years. The man who had once been so vain that he had asked Beau Brummel to mentor him in all things sartorial refused to go out in public, so ashamed was he of his elephantine appearance.
George IV died at the age of sixty-seven on June 26, 1830, as the result of a burst blood vessel in his abdomen. He was succeeded by his younger brother William, Duke of Clarence, who ruled as William IV.
GEORGE IV and Mary Robinson 1757-1800
On December 3, 1779, readers of the London daily papers would have seen an advertisement announcing: Drury Lane
By Command of their Majesties
The sixth time these ten years
At the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane
This Day will be Presented
The Winter’s Tale
(altered by Garrick from Shakespeare)
Mary Robinson, one of the theatre company’s leading luminaries, was assigned the central role of Perdita, the shepherd girl who falls in love with a handsome prince and does not learn until the denouement that she herself is really a princess.
In her day, Mary was a glamorous superstar renowned for her fashion sense; she was an enormous trendsetter, and her influence extended to her choice of theatrical costumes as well as her offstage ensembles, which included scandalous appearances at the London pleasure gardens wearing breeches. On the night of the command performance for the royal family, rather than attire herself in frothy flounces, which was the standard costume for such heroines, Mary chose something more rustic, which would show her figure and her abundant auburn hair to advantage: a tight-fitting red jacket and matching ribbons in her hair.
One of her costars, a Mr. Smith, remarked, “By Jove, Mrs. Robinson, you will make a conquest of the prince; for tonight you look handsomer than ever.”
The compliment didn’t help dispel Mary’s preperformance jitters. And when the seventeen-year-old heir to the English throne fixed his attention on her, the twenty-two-year-old married actress was so discombobulated that she raced through her lines with the speed of a runaway horse. But George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, wasn’t paying much attention to the script. He was utterly entranced by Mary’s appearance and vivacity, and could see little else.
By the final scene, Mary realized just what an impact she had scored. Recalling the momentous event in her memoirs, she wrote, “with a look that I shall never forget, he gently inclined his head a second time; I felt the compliment and blushed my gratitude.” At the end of the performance, the actors lined up across the stage and waited respectfully while the royal party exited in front of them. The Prince of Wales again inclined his head to Mary, a gesture that was not missed by anyone remaining in the house, and certainly not by Mary’s fellow performers. The heir’s attention was the talk of the company.
Mary endeavored to modestly downplay George’s subtle flirtations, but inside she was all aflutter. The middle-class girl from Bristol who had become a “household name” in her own right now secretly gave her imagination free rein.
The day after the command performance, the prince’s confidant, Viscount Malden, paid Mary a call. He was bearing a gushing letter addressed to “Perdita” from an admirer calling himself “Florizel.” According to her memoirs, Mary said to Malden, “Well, my lord, and what does this mean?”
“Can you not guess the writer?” replied the viscount.
“ ‘Perhaps yourself, my lord,’ cried I gravely.”
Malden assured her that he would never presume to offer such florid compliments on so short an acquaintance. The Prince of Wales, however, was unconcerned with that sort of etiquette. Mary remained skeptical about the identity of her epistolary admirer until Malden visited the following day with another letter, purportedly from the prince, in which His Highness assured her that he would give her a demonstrable sign of his attraction for her that evening at the oratorio, a religious concert where the young prince and his family were to be in attendance.
Through Malden, who now became the couple’s official courier, Mary reminded the prince that she was a married woman, and that if she were to attend the concert, it would be in the company of her husband. By that time, Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, who had wed in April 1773, when Mary was all of fifteen years old, had unofficially parted ways, divorce being a near impossibility for the English middle class. Mr. Robinson was an unemployed, hard-drinking, hard-gambling womanizer who kept two mistresses, and Mary was well rid of him. But for an actress, a profession notorious for its lack of respectability, being married, however unhappily, lent a woman a measure of propriety.
At the oratorio, the prince, sitting in his box, engaged in an elaborate pantomime, where he seductively touched his glass to his lips, and pretended to write something on the edge of the box. Soon, the daily papers were buzzing with tidbits of gossip about the pair; and from salons to coffeehouses, the buzz centered on the prince’s fancy. “Florizel” wrote to his “Perdita” almost daily. Mrs. Robinson would become the first in a long line of George’s mistresses.
But not yet.
Mary was a sensible young woman. She understood that her giddy epistolary romance might as well have been written in the sand they used to set the ink. George continually pressed her for a private meeting, but Mary was not yet willing to surrender her charms. For one thing, the prince—though he seemed to have no qualms about taking a married woman as his mistress—emphatically believed that the theatre was a disgraced profession. If Mary were to become his lover, she would have to relinquish her stage career, an uncomfortable trade-off. Not only was she a bona fide stage star who loved her job, but Mary was one of the few women of her day who had managed to secure an independent living, supporting herself, her wayward spouse, and their young daughter solely on the income she made as an actress. And it was quite an impressive income, even if Mary did have a penchant for spending every penny of it on clothes and new carriages.
But George was an eager pup and unwilling to be forestalled. He begged Mary to visit him disguised as a man, but the actress, renowned for showing off her legs in “breeches parts,” dissuaded him. He sent her his portrait in miniature, ringed with diamonds. Even when their liaison ended, Mary cherished the portrait; in early 1782, Sir Thomas Gainsborough painted Mary holding it, and when her other possessions were auctioned off to pay her debts, she clung to this tiny treasure. Describing the miniature in her memoirs, Mary wrote, “Within the case was a small hea
rt cut in paper, which I also have; on the one side was written ‘Je ne change qu’en mourant.’ On the other, ‘Unalterable to my Perdita through life,’” more or less the English translation of the French phrase written on the flip side of the heart.
Although Mary delighted in their passionate correspondence, she still kept the prince’s person at arm’s length. “I recommended him to be patient till he should become his own master; to wait until he knew more of my mind and manners before he engaged in a public attachment to me and, above all, to do nothing that might incur the displeasure of the royal family.”
To prove his earnestness and his devotion, the prince sent Mary a promissory note or bond for £20,000 (nearly $4 million today), payable upon his coming of age, although His Highness would not turn twenty-one until August 12, 1783. When Mary opened the envelope, she burst into a flood of astonished tears, convinced by the magnanimity of the gesture that the prince was taking her concerns seriously. Were she now to cast off her lucrative career to become a royal mistress, her financial sacrifice would not be overlooked.
Finally, Mary consented to a meeting with His Royal Highness. Lord Malden brokered the nocturnal liaison, which took place just beyond the iron gates of Kew Palace. Literally cloaked, the would-be lovers exchanged furtive words and sighs, but their interview was abruptly halted when they heard noises coming from the palace. The prince scurried indoors while Mary (and Malden) beat a hasty retreat for the little boat that had transported them downriver. But that intimate meeting had done much to sway Mary’s inclinations from esteem to ardor. During just a few minutes together she had become utterly smitten. “How my soul would have idolized such a husband,” she wrote in her memoirs.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 25