The Mistresses of Cliveden: Three Centuries of Scandal, Power and Intrigue in an English Stately Home

by Natalie Livingstone

  Inoculation had been introduced into Constantinople around 1672. From 1706 onwards, Continental physicians were becoming aware of the technique, but were slow to adopt it; British doctors were slower still. Lady Montagu, who had been left without eyelashes and with a badly pockmarked face following an attack of smallpox, became the procedure’s greatest advocate. In March 1718 she had her five-year-old son inoculated by Charles Maitland, the embassy surgeon in Constantinople, and after returning to London in April 1721, she asked Maitland to inoculate her four-year-old daughter. This was to be the first professional inoculation in England. Members of the royal family began to take an interest in the method, influenced by Queen Caroline’s near loss of a daughter from smallpox, and also by Sir Hans Sloane, president of the Royal Society, who had observed Lady Montagu’s daughter after her inoculation and voiced his support of the procedure.21 Though Frederick and his sisters had been inoculated in childhood, Augusta was fearful about the side effects and agonised over whether to subject her own children to the relatively new procedure. Despite her trepidation, she decided that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.

  Frederick and Augusta’s family life was not just a private matter – it was also used in propaganda in the form of portraits by popular artists such as van Loo and Allan Ramsay, to make the Prince and Princess of Wales look like secure heirs to the throne. While these portraits were commissioned for display on the walls of great aristocratic houses, they were also accessible to a broader audience: painters’ studios were adept at producing copies, and mezzotints of popular images circulated both nationally and internationally. Contemporary portraits of Augusta surrounded by her children cast her as doting mother and supportive wife – a striking contrast to the popular portrayal of George II, who was seen as cold, unloving and, worst of all, more German than English. The couple’s blissful family life at Cliveden, complete with strolls, picnics in the garden and children’s birthday parties, formed the bedrock of this public-relations strategy. One notable 1746 portrait of the six eldest Wales children, painted by Barthélemy du Pan, is set in a landscape of romantic woodland, cultivated land, and landscaped ‘English garden’, which was by now widely associated with patriotism and liberty. The off-centre focus of the portrait is Prince George, who appears to have just won an archery contest, and is depicted as a wholesome, pastoral and freedom-loving heir.

  But Frederick was not the only prince styling himself and his heirs as suitable kings-in-waiting. George II had long considered his younger son, William, Duke of Cumberland, as another possible successor, and it was rumoured that he intended to divide up his territories, sending Frederick back to Hanover as protector so as to clear the path for William to inherit the British throne. Moreover, William’s recent military successes had given him the opportunity to style himself as an alternative, far more martial heir. In July 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the eldest grandson of James II, landed in Scotland with an army, intending to reclaim the British throne for the Stuarts. In mid-September he took Edinburgh and his father was proclaimed King James VIII of Scotland. William was recalled from service in Flanders and sent north to meet the rebels. His troops came head to head with the Jacobite forces on 16 April at Culloden, a small village near Inverness. In the fighting that ensued, the majority of Charles’s 5,000 men were slaughtered. William marched back into London triumphant and ready to capitalise on the status of national hero that the victory had afforded him.

  Frederick’s only contribution to the campaign was ordering the christening cake of his youngest son, Henry, to be made in the shape of Carlisle Castle, which the Jacobites had captured on their march south. Guests were invited to bombard the cake with sugarplums; in late December, his brother would besiege the real castle, take it back for the crown, and send those within for execution.22 Frederick’s decision to counter Jacobite force with farce was a rare misstep; he risked being seen as the frivolous prince in comparison to his brother’s soldier king. To reinforce his credentials as a worthy successor, Frederick would have to play his cards with greater care, and it was his family life with Augusta that remained his trump.

  Chapter 6

  THE CHARMS OF SYLVIA

  DURING THEIR SUMMERS, Frederick and Augusta revelled in the domestic felicity that they so heavily publicised in their propaganda. In his poem The Charms of Sylvia, Frederick celebrated Augusta’s sensual allure, ‘those breasts that swell to meet my loves’, ‘that easy sloping waist, that form divine’, before concluding, as was conventional, by glorifying her character, proclaiming it was her ‘gentleness of mind’, ‘that grace with which you speak and move’, that most ignited his passion and ‘set my soul on fire’.1 Despite their evident passion for each other, the couple lived relatively independent lives – as was customary at the time. They breakfasted in their own rooms, where they were brought coffee or hot chocolate with bread, butter and muffins. Augusta’s favourite drink was not served in the morning, but after dinner, either in the drawing room, where she invariably brewed it herself in a silver kettle, or in the Octagonal Temple, which she had converted into a tea room.2 The use of space in country houses had changed during the early 18th century: the drawing room was becoming a more important place for socialising, and many owners now kept specialised ‘dining rooms’ as distinct from the great hall, which could be configured for many different purposes. Frederick and Augusta hosted many glittering soirées at Cliveden. The gradual improvement of highways meant that the travel time from London was decreasing, making it easier for friends to come for an evening. Better roads enabled Frederick and Augusta to lunch in London or dine at Cliveden whenever they wanted; in the next century the advent of train travel would further shrink the distance between the city and its surrounding country houses.

  When Frederick and Augusta were not entertaining guests, they dined together, probably in Frederick’s apartment. Their catering was run by James Douglas and Charles Hamilton, brother of Jane Hamilton, whom Frederick continued to keep as a mistress. Eschewing the aristocratic fashion for employing a French chef, Frederick retained two German ‘yeomen cooks’ to cater for Augusta’s tastes. The couple’s wine was bought by a man called Jephson, and Rhenish wine was a particular favourite of Augusta’s.3 When not hosting a formal dinner, Augusta liked nothing better than dining in the open air, or brewing tea on the terrace or the lawn under one of the large yellow canvas umbrellas George Cure, who managed the household, had erected to provide shade from the afternoon sun.

  Augusta and Frederick shared the Orkneys’ love of the garden at Cliveden, playing rounders and ninepin with their children as well as cricket, which Frederick famously enjoyed and also helped popularise.4 Music was another daily feature of their life together, and when the weather permitted, performances took place outside. Frederick even kept a special barge moored on the Thames to act as a floating stage for orchestras during garden parties. Theatrical productions also took place in the gardens, both in the grass amphitheatre that Bridgeman had designed for Orkney, and on custom-built stages. Alfred was not exceptional among the performances that took place at Cliveden in its use of professional actors: Frederick often called upon his connections in the management of the London theatres to provide actors, set designers and singers for his garden shows. The ready availability of professional talent did not exclude those of the couple’s children who were old enough from taking part.

  These amateur dramatics were not simply for the idle amusement of the children. After the 1747 general election, Frederick returned to active political opposition, heading a party that was led in the Commons by William Pitt the Younger and Francis Ayscough. The election, like many early 18th-century contests before it, should have returned a Tory majority given the significant rural support commanded by the party. But the uneven distribution of votes and seats, as well as the limited nature of the franchise, rendered the Tories permanently in a position of minority opposition, sometimes, as on the issue of Frederick’s finances, allied with disaffected Whigs.
On his 1747 return to politics, Frederick would once again seek to forge an opposition group around his own personal concerns, though his current cause – that the crown not be diverted to his younger brother – had larger political ramifications than his previous campaign for a bigger allowance.

  In 1749, Frederick returned to theatre as a vehicle to promote his patriotism and royal right when he had his children put on a production of Joseph Addison’s Cato. Frederick had a clear vision of the dynastic roles his children should perform, and neatly expressed these in the parts he had them play. By having his eldest son, George, play Cato’s eldest son, Portius, Frederick implied a parallel between himself and the titular statesman, whom the play shows resisting the tyranny and corruption of Julius Caesar. In case the parallel was not clear enough, in the prologue to the play Prince George announced himself as ‘A boy in England born – in England bred… where freedom well becomes the earlier state. For there the love of liberty’s innate’. Princess Augusta would later be married to the heir of the duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, a fate expressed by her character in the play, who accepted that she must ‘wed a foreigner, and cross the sea – God knows where’. Edward’s future role as Elector of Hanover was reflected in his part of Juba, Prince of Numidia. The destiny of Frederick’s younger son Henry, however, defied neat allegory: he would live in America as the head of a new seaboard colony, and be ennobled as Duke of Virginia.5

  Frederick and Augusta also had to maintain estates befitting a king-in-waiting. They had always expected to invest heavily in the gardens at Cliveden: the Orkneys made it clear, when the prince took the lease, that they expected at least £300 per year to be spent on the development and upkeep of their beloved grounds. This was not an exceptional commitment for the royal couple, who devoted much time and attention to the gardens of all their estates. Work on the 9-acre garden of Carlton House (acquired by Frederick in 1732) started in 1735, and the nurserymen’s lists show the immense variety of the planting there. Overall, some 14,100 products were supplied: 1,500 elms of various sorts, 400 cherries, 1,400 hornbeams, 1,000 chestnuts, 500 yews, 150 firs and the same number of hollies and oaks, several tulip trees, walnuts, mulberries, and large quantities of laurels, lilacs, laburnums, roses, honeysuckles, jasmines, laurustinus and bulbs.6 At Kew, Augusta and her friend the Earl of Bute established what would later become the Royal Botanic Gardens.7

  Although the alterations that Augusta and Frederick carried out at Cliveden were not on the same scale as those at Carlton House, they did stamp their mark on the estate, adding a coffee room adjoining an existing thatched house in the grounds, a stable block to accommodate five more horses, and several sheds and barns that evidence the ongoing cultivation of the estate grounds.8 Perhaps the most unusual additions were two aviaries and a flower garden; at Kew and Carlton house, Augusta had attempted to combine her interests in bird-keeping and floriculture by selecting for her garden birds and flowers whose appearance, song and scent would complement each other. In the late 1730s she purchased indigenous and exotic birds including magpies, Virginia nightingales, parakeets, bullfinches and goldfinches, as well as bird cages and nets. Augusta’s purchases for Cliveden are not as well documented as those for Carlton and Kew, but we can presume that the aviaries and flower garden at Cliveden were similarly ambitious, marrying the mating chorus with spring scents.

  The couple also had plans for the interior of the house. In 1738, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, wrote that Augusta had incurred ‘a good deal of expense at Cliveden in building and furniture’.9 Frederick’s bedroom was decorated with elaborate Chinese wallpaper painted in a design of green poppies on a white background, with green and white borders. Linen was hung in some of the rooms, and new furnishings – such as a carved gilt frame for a glass in Augusta’s dressing room – were installed with the help of George Cure.10 Benjamin Goodison, the prince’s cabinetmaker, made furniture for Cliveden, including a ‘dressing glass’ with an elaborately sculpted frame.11

  Because Frederick expected his kingship to begin imminently, the couple did not make structural changes to the house. However, we do know that painters were employed to do maintenance work on the outside of the building, because in 1743, one of them fell to his death from some scaffolding. The story attracted interest from the newspapers and in May that year, the London Evening Post reported that the prince had arranged for the family of the workman to be provided for.12 Frederick’s actions in this instance fitted neatly into the role he had been given by the press, of a paternalistic people’s prince. On 16 September 1740, the same newspaper had reported how ‘his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales… out of his great Goodness and Generosity’ had given an annual pension of 20 pounds to the widow of his head gamekeeper, Mr Shooman;13 in November 1743, the papers carried stories about the prince’s generosity towards a sailor, Thomas Adkens, who had been blinded in a fight with a Spanish privateer, and turned up at the gates of Cliveden asking for help. ‘With that humanity and generosity so peculiar to his Royal Highness’, Frederick promised to provide Adkens with both medical and financial assistance.14

  Outside of these well-publicised acts of kindness, Frederick and Augusta developed a reputation for showing consistent care and generosity towards their staff. The Wales’s footmen received £41 per annum and their coachmen £45, both generous salaries for the time, and humble employees such as grooms were provided with expensive medical treatment.15 Moreover, during his stays at Cliveden and Kew, Frederick made time to visit the local cottages, sitting down and talking to the villagers about their lives. This became common practice among the Victorian aristocracy, but in Frederick’s day it was unprecedented for a prince.

  At Cliveden, Frederick was not above taking a mug of ale at the local public house, often accompanied by Bloodworth, the equerry who had assisted Augusta’s night-time escape from Hampton Court in 1737.16 There is more than a touch of a previous Prince of Wales, the Prince Hal of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, in the idea of Frederick, banished from his father’s presence, drinking in company that must have included commoners. It was not only in the pub that Frederick encountered ordinary Britons. He and Augusta pioneered the royal walkabout, visiting everything from workshops to fairground booths, and talking with the people who worked there. In this, as in their campaign for British clothing, they showed concern for the welfare of the up-and-coming middle classes, the ‘trading’ part of the nation. Subsequently, in a fitting tribute to its most famous patron, Cliveden’s local pub was renamed The Three Feathers after the emblem of the Prince of Wales. Two hundred years later, Nancy Astor, a famous opponent of excessive alcohol consumption, would try to shut the pub down.

  By the 1740s, George II had reached his mid-sixties and Frederick was increasingly sure that his own kingship was imminent. George Bubb Dodington, the prince’s staunch supporter, recorded dining with Frederick at Carlton House to discuss ‘the immediate steps to be taken upon the demise of the King’, and Frederick redoubled his efforts to promote his kingly qualities to the public.17 In the summer of 1750, he made two tours of the south and west of England, highlights of which were reported in the Remembrancer, a relatively new newspaper sponsored by the prince. Frederick’s confidence was palpable and his belief in his right of succession unshakeable. The prince’s regal image had also eclipsed that of his brother, William, whose reputation as a soldier had transfigured into one of bloodlust and violence. In 1747, George II finally issued an official declaration citing Frederick as his successor, albeit with the bitter warning that King Frederick would ‘live long enough to ruin us all’.18 By the turn of the new decade, Frederick seemed poised to take the crown.

  But despite all this preparation, Augusta and Frederick’s long-awaited coronation was never to occur. In March 1751, Frederick was taken ill at Kew, ‘after staying all day in the garden till night, in the damp rain and hail to look at his workmen’.19 For two weeks, the prince suffered from ‘a violent pain in his side’, accompanied by fever and fainting fits. August
a, distraught and pregnant with the couple’s ninth and last child, maintained a bedside vigil throughout his brief and painful illness. Frederick died on 20 March, aged only 44. A rumour went round that he had died from a cricket ball hitting his head, but in reality the prince died as a result of a blood clot in his lungs. ‘Je sens la mort,’ he cried out, wrestling with death in vain, until he eventually succumbed, a little after nine o’clock.20

  Ironically, George II, whose death had seemed imminent in the 1740s, outlived his son by nine years. For his part, George exhibited some hitherto buried emotion in the weeks following Frederick’s death. In public George maintained an emotionally cold appearance but in private, with his son’s wife and children, he showed more sympathy. He was said to have told his grandsons that ‘they must be brave boys’; he embraced Augusta and ‘wept with her’.21

  Frederick was buried in Henry VII’s chapel, Westminster Abbey, on 13 April 1751. Some members of his household, particularly George Bubb Dodington, felt that the arrangements failed to honour him sufficiently, as no music was commissioned for the occasion and Frederick’s family, including George II, were predictably absent.22 Nevertheless, the funeral was conducted with the same level of extravagance with which Frederick lived his life – it cost nearly £2,400, almost as much as would later be spent on the funeral of his father.23 Frederick’s death was a cataclysmic blow for Augusta; aged just 31 she had lost the man who had been her companion since her teens, and with him, her long-held expectation of becoming queen consort. Augusta’s world had fallen apart.