Royal Bastards

by Roger Powell

  Madam von Wallmoden first caught the King’s eye in 1735 during a visit to Hanover. Surprisingly, the King then wrote to his wife, the Queen, describing his conquest in some detail. The result of this intimacy, Johann, was born in April 1736. He was brought up at the English Court, to which his mother had been brought by the King. She was installed at St James’s Palace and was created Countess of Yarmouth on 24 March 1740. Her arrival was hailed by Walpole, in the hope that her influence might be politically helpful, but in the event, Lady Yarmouth proved entirely unfit for the role of a Pompadour, and she had the good sense to abstain from meddling in Court intrigues. Prior to Madam Wallmoden, the King had Lady Suffolk as his mistress after whom he enjoyed the favours of Lady Deloraine, governess to the Princesses Mary and Louisa.

  Lady Deloraine was the widow of Henry Scott, Earl of Deloraine, younger son of the ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, illegitimate son of King Charles II. She was his second wife and was made a widow by his sudden death in 1730, aged fifty-five, the same age as his grandfather King Charles, when he died. At the time of her affair with King George, she was the wife of William Wyndham, of Ersham, Norfolk. Although described by Lord Hervey as ‘very handsome’, Sir Robert Walpole’s description of her was less than flattering: ‘very dangerous, a weak head, a pretty face, a lying tongue, and a false heart, making always sad work’. By her first husband she bore two daughters.

  After the death of the King in 1760, whose affections she never lost, the Countess of Yarmouth, returned to Hanover, where she died on 19 October 1765. Meanwhile Johann entered the Hanoverian Service where he bore high command, in the war with the French (1793-1801) albeit with no great distinction, even though he was a Field Marshal. He also became Count Wallmoden of Hanover and died some ten years afterwards in Hanover in October 1811.

  Chapter IX

  The Bastards of Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of King George II (1707–51)

  Cornwall FitzFrederick (1732–36)And Amelia FitzFrederick (b & d. 1733)

  Both children were the illegitimate issue of Frederick, Prince of Wales and The Hon. Anne Vane. She was the daughter of Gilbert, 2nd Baron Barnard and the sister of Henry, 1st Earl of Darlington as well as the sister-in-law of Grace FitzRoy, daughter of Charles, 1st Duke of Southampton and 2nd Duke of Cleveland, (see page 56), the illegitimate son of King Charles II. Anne was well known from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s line ‘Yet Vane can tell what ills from beauty spring’, but she died unmarried in Bath on 11 March 1735/6, outliving both her children.

  Her son, Cornwall FitzFrederick was born on 4 June 1732 and baptised on 17 June following at St James Piccadilly. He died on 23 February 1736 and was buried on 26 February in Westminster Abbey, aged only three.

  His sister, Amelia FitzFrederick, was born on 21 April 1733, but she died the following day on 22 April 1733.

  Chapter X

  The Bastards of George, Prince of Wales, later King George IV (1762-1830)

  Major George Seymour Crole (1799–1863)

  George Seymour Crole, was born 23 August 1799 in Chelsea, the illegitimate son of George, Prince of Wales, later George IV, and Elizabeth Fox, alias Crole. He was never officially recognised by his father, although there is evidence to show that he admitted to it privately, but he was provided for throughout his life by his father as well as William IV and Queen Victoria.

  George’s mother had been born about 1770, the daughter of Joseph and Eleanor Fox. Joseph had been a tavern keeper in Bow St, Covent Garden before acquiring the lease of the Brighton theatre, and was described by one contemporary as ‘a very odd character … he could combine twenty occupations without being clever in one … He was actor, fiddler, painter etc’ and by another as ‘a low person at Brighthelmstone’.

  Mr Fox died in 1791, leaving considerable debts of £2,700, whereupon his widow sold the theatre for an annuity of £70 and a free benefit performance. It was about this time that Elizabeth adopted the name of Crole, although no one seems to know why. She also became the mistress of George, the 3rd Earl of Egremont, who installed her in a house in Hans Place, Chelsea. She bore him four children, Mary, born about 1792, Charles Richard, born 1793, Elizabeth Eleanor, born 1796 and William John, born 1797. The elder son became an officer in the army and the younger son became a clergyman.

  Young Crole’s date of birth suggests that Elizabeth’s relationship with the Prince of Wales began in late 1798, although there is evidence to suggest that it may have begun earlier in the year. Egremont had settled on her an annuity of £400 per annum, whereas the Prince promised her an annuity of £1,000 plus a house in Pall Mall. Sadly neither materialized and Elizabeth was forced to remain at Hans Place. However, she did eventually receive an annuity of £500 from the Privy Purse which was paid to her for the rest of her life.

  Although the young ‘prince’ did not like the army life ‘I never had much partiality for it, as it neither suits my habits nor inclinations’, he declared, he entered the service as an Ensign in the 21st Dragoons (1817), having first been to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst where he studied arithmetic, French, mathematics, fortification and military drawing, the fees for which were paid from the Privy Purse. In 1818 he was transferred to the 11th Dragoons and then promoted to Lieutenant (1820). For ten years he served in India where he became ADC to the Marquess of Hastings, Governor of Bengal, and subsequently Earl Amherst, living sumptuously in Government House. In 1823 he became a Captain by purchase in the 41st Regiment of Foot and then purchased the rank of Major (1826) for £1,400. He then returned home, before being sent off to the Ionian Islands with the 28th Foot.

  According to his mother he was ‘a very gentlemanlike young man quiet and unpresuming – having been all his life accustomed to consider himself as the natural son of the King’. On the death of his alleged father King George IV in 1830, he was left a capital sum of £30,000 plus a cash payment of £10,000. The capital sum earned him an annuity of £300 which enabled him to quit the army the following year and sell his commission, being ‘heartily sick of the service.’ He then settled down to civilian life and spent the remainder of his years living at Chatham in the Sun Hotel where he had gone to spend just one night, but instead remained there for thirty years. He was regarded as a generous, if somewhat eccentric character; he died there unmarried on 18 June 1863 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. All of his assets passed to his younger half brother the Rev William John Crole Wyndham. His only surviving sister, Mary, married Mrs Jordan’s eldest son the Earl of Munster (see page 129). His mother, who never married, died on 15 February 1840, aged sixty-nine.

  Chapter XI

  The Bastards of William, Duke of Clarence, later King William IV (1765–1837)

  William Henry Courtenay (1788–1807)

  William Henry Courtenay, was born around 1788, the eldest known illegitimate son of William, Duke of Clarence, later King William IV by an unknown mother. One source speculates that he might have been born near Lake Courtenay in Nova Scotia, or to be more precise Shelburne, which the Prince had visited in October 1788. By the following year, the latter was back in England and had taken up in quick succession with two young women, Sally Winne, the daughter of a Plymouth merchant, and Polly Finch, ‘a handsome young woman who plied her trade in London’. Not surprisingly the Prince’s reputation suffered a great deal with this type of behaviour, and indeed his army friend Lieutenant William Dyott recorded of him that he ‘would go into any house where he saw a pretty girl, and was perfectly acquainted with every house of a certain description in the town (Shelburne)’. He was known by his friends as ‘Silly Billy’. Other sources have suggested that William was conceived and born in Hanover.

  It was not until the Prince met Mrs Jordan and settled down to a decade of cosy domesticity, that his reputation improved somewhat. That the Duke and Mrs Jordan were intimate prior to 1793 it clear from the fact that she miscarried the Duke’s first child by her on 6 August 1792, the Duke declaring ‘the papers have on this occasion told the truth, for she was last we
ek for some hours in danger, but now, thank God, she is much better and I hope in a fair way of recovery’.

  Young Courtenay first appears in the Prince’s household in 1794 and was cared for by Mrs Jordan, despite the fact that she was not his mother. Indeed he was very fond of her and she of him: ‘I left William at school’ she wrote on one occasion ‘who cried on my leaving him, and told Mrs Sketchley that he would rather live with Mrs Jordan…’ On another occasion Mrs Jordan wrote to the Prince that he was ‘a very fine boy and will, I am sure, prove himself everything you wish’.

  Courtenay’s first taste of the naval life came in 1803 when he joined the ship Majestic at Plymouth as a volunteer 1st class, aged fifteen. The ship’s captain was none other than Lord Amelius Beauclerk, third son of the 5th Duke of St Albans and himself a great-great-grandson of King Charles II. The Majestic was part of the Channel Fleet that blockaded Brest and guarded the approaches to Ireland in order to prevent the French transports from invading England. His next assignment was a stint of service in the Tribune which took him to Gibraltar and on the homeward journey witnessed the capture of five small Spanish vessels. Next the Duke obtained for him the post of midshipman on the ship Blenheim which promptly sailed for the East Indies escorting a convoy of twenty-two East Indiamen. The ship arrived in India on 23 August 1805, and whilst there Courtenay was transferred to the frigate Macassar only to return to the Blenheim a short time after. In retrospect this was to be a fateful decision, because the Blenheim was not seaworthy, having run aground on a sandbank in the Straits of Malacca. On 1 February 1807 the ship was caught up in a squall six hundred miles east of Mauritius and lost with all hands on board, including young Courtenay – a loss keenly felt by his father and Mrs Jordan. Writing a year later to Thomas Coutts, the banker, the Duke speaking of his children, remarked ‘I have lost one who was drowned in the Blenheim. I have one in the Army and at the Military College, the second in the Navy.’

  George Augustus Frederick FitzClarence, PC, FRS, 1st Earl of Munster (1794–1842)

  George FitzClarence was born on 29 January 1794 at seven o’clock in the morning in Somerset Street, off Portman Square, London, the eldest of five sons and five daughters all born to the indefatigable Dorothy Bland alias Mrs Jordan (1761–1816), the well known comic actress, by her Royal lover the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV. This liaison was popularly described as ‘his bathing in the River Jordan’. George’s date of birth differs from that given in The Complete Peerage and was taken from a list prepared by William IV and signed by him in the Archives of Wemyss Castle.

  Dora, as she was known to William, the younger daughter of Francis Bland, an actor and stage hand, (and himself the third son of Nathaniel Bland, an Irish Judge), possessed many good qualities but chastity was not one of them, having previously had three illegitimate children by Sir Richard Ford, a police magistrate, and another son by Richard Daly, the manager of the Theatre Royal in Cork. Her fecundity was remarkable, and at her death she was survived by no less than thirteen of her fourteen children. Her family’s motto Nec Temere Nec Timide (neither rashly nor fearfully) was not followed by the Duke and his lover, as their twenty year affair was conducted openly and all their children were given the surname of FitzClarence. She was described by Leigh Hunt (RA-GEO/Add/40/255) as ‘so pleasant, so cordial, so natural, so full of spirits, so healthily constituted in mind and body, had such a shapely leg withal, so charming a voice and such a happy and happy-making expression of countenance’

  Nevertheless, the hundreds of letters in the Royal Archives between Mrs. Jordan and her royal lover from 1790–1814 testify to the strength and longevity of their relationship. Yet ultimately it seems to have foundered from lack of money as Mrs. Jordan’s acting career came to an end and their debts began to mount. In 1811 the Duke of Clarence coldly began a seven year search to find a rich wife who emerged in the shape of Princess Adelaide Louisa Theresa Caroline Amelia (1792–1849), the eldest daughter of George I, reigning Duke of Saxe Meiningen. They were duly married in 1819 but had no surviving issue. Tonybee in his introduction to the actor Macready’s Diaries, states that ‘it is perhaps not surprising that in after years he (Macready) should have poured bitter contempt on the royal lover who, having profited for years by her splendid earnings, abruptly consigned her to poverty and neglect’. For five years later, Mrs. Jordan died near Paris, in exile, alone, as well as in poverty and misery.

  Meanwhile, George, their eldest child, became a soldier by profession and served in the 10th Royal Hussars. In the Royal Archives, there are literally hundreds of letters to him from both his mother and father and these give some account of his military experiences from the age of fourteen when he first sailed for Portugal. His father was obviously proud of him, especially with reports from Brigadier General Charles Stewart, (to whom he was ADC), describing him as a ‘Gallant Fellow’ (RA-GEO/Add/39/07) and writing to ‘express my continued satisfaction and approbation’ (RA-GEO/Add/39/20). His mother’s letters were more critical urging him to pay more attention to his writing and spelling and referring to his bills which she thought ‘extravagantly high’.

  He later fought at the battle of Corunna, was wounded and captured by the French at Fuentes de Onoro, but escaped, wounded again at Toulon and later served in India as ADC to the Governor General. On his return from his first term of duty his proud father wrote to his sister Princess Amelia in the following words:

  ‘I am happy to inform you that George arrived last night in high health and spirits, after having established a perfect character with all ranks in our army’. ‘General Stewart, (later 3rd Marquess of Londonderry), who certainly on one occasion saved his life, speaks of my son in such terms of commendation, that unless writing to you I would not mention the circumstances. Indeed in the event of the General going again he told me he would rather have George than any other for his aide-de-camp’.

  Despite retiring on half pay as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Coldstream Guards in 1828, George was appointed Deputy Adjutant General of the Forces in July 1830 but resigned in high dudgeon the following December. Ultimately he was promoted to Major General in 1841 to command Western District, and was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London (1831–33), Constable of Windsor Castle (from 1833 with its annual salary of £1,300 and membership of the Privy Council), and ADC to his father and later Queen Victoria. However, after much lobbying, he had had to wait until the advanced age of thirty-seven before he was ennobled as Earl of Munster in 1831 following his father’s accession. Nevertheless, he was disappointed that it was not a dukedom even though it was one of his father’s former titles. He therefore spent the next ten years asking for more. However, despite all these honours and being described in the patent as ‘Our dearly beloved natural son’, he and his brothers were constantly to plague their father for more honours and appointments and more cash, and indeed when George was asked who should carry the Crown at his father’s Coronation, his retort was ‘who is more fit that your own flesh and blood’. The Morning Post was incensed at ‘the impudence and rapacity’ of the FitzJordans, and in the next reign, Queen Victoria was to dismiss her cousins as ‘ghosts best forgotten’.

  Much of his time in later life seems to have been spent in pursuit of fame, fortune and honours. He was constantly pressing both his father and afterwards Queen Victoria for financial help and for lucrative appointments for both himself and even his children. In the Royal Archives is a bound book of 113 pages, being A Copy of correspondence between His Majesty King William IV and the Right Honble The Earl of Munster in April and May 1837 relative to a provision for the Earldom of Munster with a commentary thereon and An Appendix containing a copy of a former correspondence upon the same subject (RA-GEO/Add/39/657). This shows in some detail and at great length, how the King had attempted to provide equally for all his children and how Munster was affronted by not having received more on the grounds of primogeniture and the néed to endow his earldom. Indeed, at one stage, he even refused to accept paymen
ts on the grounds that they were not enough and for a time he estranged himself from his father.

  Queen Victoria’s diaries also make many references to this. On 24 January 1838 the Queen ‘showed him [Lord Melbourne] a letter from Lord Munster to Lord Conyngham expressing his gratitude and wishing to see me to thank me in his own and in his brothers’ and sisters’ names for what I had done for them’ (VIC/QVJ/1838 24 January) – i.e. extending their annual allowances, originally granted by King George IV. Four months later, George was back seeing Lord Melbourne about their FitzClarence pensions from the Civil List. In the diary entry for 15 May 1838 it states that ‘Lord Munster told Lord Melbourne that the late King always imagined that Lord Egremont (his father-in-law) would leave Lord Munster a great deal’ whereas in the event he gave Lord Munster £5,000 about a fortnight before he died. Egremont had long been suspicious that ‘the King had promoted the match on account of the money’. But in September that year, there is a reference to Egremont having given George a property in Somerset.

  In 1819 George had married another bastard, Mary Wyndham, natural daughter of the Earl of Egremont (who regarded her as over-religious), by whom he had four sons and three daughters, and indeed one of his grandsons was to be awarded a VC and bar. George was soon busy promoting their interests as well as his own, when writing to his father and later Queen Victoria over the next twenty years, both of whom were remarkably generous and tolerant. Indeed there are many references in Queen Victoria’s diaries to Munster dining at Windsor, including on Christmas Day 1838 when he ‘was in high spirits and talking a great deal’ prompting Melbourne to comment ‘I never knew such a wrong-headed man; he never sees a thing right; and then always thinks he is right.’ (VIC/QVJ/1838 26 December). There are also three large filing boxes of correspondence in the Royal Archives entitled The Munster Papers 1805–41 but they do not cast George in a favourable light.