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

by Tracy Borman

  The remodelling of Blickling took more than a decade, but the result was a triumph. Lyminge had created an exquisite Jacobean mansion for his patron, the envy of the nobility for miles around. Contemporary visitors would have been impressed by the first sight of the building: the warm colour of its brickwork, the glittering of its many leaded windows, its festive turrets with their gilded vanes, the extravagant gables and the outstretched arms of the wings, flanked with dark walls of yew. Its appearance was to remain unchanged for centuries. In the 1930s, Country Life magazine enthused: ‘The suddenness and completeness with which the scene bursts upon the eye strikes a simultaneous chord rather than a scale of impressions: a backwater in time . . . a vanished line of Norfolk grandees, the generous vitality of Shakespeare’s England, the childhood of Anne Boleyn, and, muted by the imprisoned mist of time, faint memories of famous knights, the pomp of bishops’ courts, and the last of the Saxon kings passing through the water-meadows that gave his manor its name.’7 Modern-day visitors to the house are treated to much the same view as Sir Henry would have enjoyed almost four hundred years earlier.

  After Sir Henry’s death, the estate passed to his son, John, who established Blickling as the principal family seat for the next twenty years. He was succeeded by his youngest daughter, Philippa, whose marriage to her first cousin, John, son of Sir Miles Hobart of Intwood, ensured that Blickling stayed in the Hobart family. It was during this time that the estate received its first royal visitor in almost two hundred years. In an attempt to secure the loyalty of this former Parliamentarian stronghold, Charles II went on progress to Norfolk in 1671.

  To the royal court in London, Norfolk seemed a remote and self-contained province, situated far from the heart of national affairs. Its topography made it even more unwelcoming, bounded as it was by sea on the north and east, by the Wash and fenlands on the west, and by wild and lonely heathlands on the south-west. From the coastal regions of this vast county, it was easier to reach Holland than to negotiate the great forests, fens and heathlands on a journey inland to other parts of England.

  This wild and isolated corner of the kingdom had a long history of rebellion and independence. Over the centuries, it had endured repeated invasions from Romans, Vikings and Normans. Many of these and subsequent invaders settled in the lands which they had come to ravage and loot. The sparse population of natives and settlers developed a character that was distinct from the rest of England and marked by a strong independence of spirit. The people have been described as ‘reserved suspicious of “foreigners”, by which they mean people from other English counties’.8 This reserve and suspicion in turn bred political and religious dissent, which found its fullest expression during the Civil War, when the county rallied to the Parliamentarian cause against the King.

  Norwich was, admittedly, the third city in the kingdom, but it had received scant attention from Tudor and Stuart monarchs. Charles II’s visit was therefore the cause of great excitement. One of the few houses of sufficient stature for the King to visit was Blickling, and Charles made his way there with the Queen, Catherine of Braganza, the Duke of York and various other court notables as part of his progress. The visit represented something of a reconciliation. Charles was fully aware that Sir John Hobart had been one of Cromwell’s most active supporters, both in the House of Commons and in county affairs. But in the spirit of appeasement that had served him so well, the King was gracious and charming to his Norfolk host. He even knighted Sir John’s eldest son, Henry (Henrietta’s father), who was then just thirteen years old. It was recorded that the royal party was ‘most noblie and plentifully treated’ in the Great Dining Room, but the apparent conviviality did not penetrate far beneath the surface. Sir John’s political stance remained unchanged, and the King was later heard to comment on the ‘hollow hospitality’ he had received at Blickling.

  Sir John Hobart returned to Parliament the following year, and after another decade of mutually exhausting political conflict, he died in 1683. And so Blickling passed to Sir Henry Hobart. It was by now an onerous legacy, for the estate was desperately in debt and already reduced to a quarter of the acreage it had possessed in 1625. He therefore set out to find a wife with a dowry large enough to ease his financial burdens. He evidently did not have to search for long, because the following year he married Elizabeth, co-heir to the famous judge, Sir Joseph Maynard.9 At the time of their marriage in 1684, Sir Henry was twenty-five years old, and his bride was seventeen. Elizabeth Maynard brought with her a £10,000 dowry, which afforded Blickling at least a temporary respite from its financial problems.

  But Sir Henry soon plunged the estate into further debt. He had inherited his father’s passion for politics and, like him, proceeded to enter into a series of cripplingly expensive election campaigns. The fact that he had been knighted by Charles II in no way reconciled Sir Henry to royal policy, and, like his father, he became an outspoken member of the Whig party. Within a few years of inheriting the estate, Sir Henry had almost brought it to its knees. He had little choice but to sell off considerable portions of it in order to keep his creditors at bay.

  Untroubled by the knowledge that her father’s profligacy was storing up problems for her future, Henrietta’s childhood, and that of her siblings, was a happy one. Although Sir Henry’s costly obsession with politics had burdened the Blickling estate with debts, there had still been money enough to provide the family with a good diet. The items listed in a bill paid to ‘Goodwife Agness Parnell’ included ‘fresh herin’, ‘anchovises’, capers, plums and coffee (something of a rarity outside London in the late seventeenth century).

  Sir Henry also ensured that his children received an education befitting their noble status: like his great-grandfather and namesake, he had a strong sense of dynastic ambition. Provision was made for his son John to receive a private education when he came of age. His daughters, meanwhile, were well versed in the social skills required of young noblewomen. The household accounts include a receipt for thirty shillings paid to a dancing-master in March 1693 ‘for twice coming to Blickling to teach the young Ladyes to Daunce’.10

  In the late seventeenth century, daughters were commonly given instruction in what was considered useful for their future way of life, in particular those accomplishments that were most likely to secure a wealthy husband. Most well-bred young ladies could play a musical instrument and were taught to dance, write, and in some cases speak modern languages such as French and Italian. Mary Dewes, a contemporary of Henrietta, reflected: ‘In our childhood, writing, dancing and music is what is most attended to.’11 The more challenging intellectual studies, meanwhile, were reserved for their male counterparts.

  This was considered the natural order of things. Published two years before Henrietta’s birth, the ‘Treatise on the Education of Daughters’ warned: ‘we should be on our guard not to make them [women] ridiculously learned. Women, in general, possess a weaker but more inquisitive mind than men; hence it follows that their pursuits should be of a quiet and sober turn. They are not formed to govern the state, to make war, or to enter into the church; so that they may well dispense with any profound knowledge relating to politics, military tactics, philosophy, and theology . . . women are by nature weaker than men.’12

  At the same time, however, there was the beginning of a subtle shift in the attitudes of many women in society. During the Civil War, with their husbands away for long periods fighting for Crown or Parliament, women had increasingly taken centre stage in the running of great houses and estates. With greater responsibilities had come a growing sense of independence. This had been augmented by the substantial loss of life among the male combatants, which meant that for many women, their new-found independence had been permanent.

  Mary Astell, often hailed as the first English feminist, argued that if women were subservient to men, then it was due to inequality of education rather than to nature. She declared: ‘I think Women as capable of Learning as Men are’, and lamented that: ‘Custom and Edu
cation have dwindled us into very Trifles! such meer Insignificants!’13 Such ideas had become increasingly widespread by the dawn of the eighteenth century. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a contemporary and later acquaintance of Henrietta, regretted that women’s education was so limited, and confessed to her daughter: ‘The ultimate aim of your education was to make you a good wife.’ She scorned the prevailing attitude, whereby ‘the same studies which raise the character of a Man should hurt that of a Woman’, so that she should ‘conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness’.14

  The cry was even taken up by some leading men of letters in the early eighteenth century. Henry Fielding criticised ‘the morose Schoolmen who wou’d confine Knowledge to the Male Part of the Species’. Jonathan Swift (who later became a close friend of Henrietta) satirised the state of affairs in his most famous work, Gulliver’s Travels, in which Gulliver’s master proclaims that it is monstrous of mankind ‘to give the females a different kind of education from the males, except in some articles of domestic management’.15

  It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that standards in women’s education underwent a marked improvement. A century earlier, when Henrietta was growing up at Blickling, they were still woefully inadequate. But despite the limitations of her education, Sir Henry’s third daughter had a keen intellect and thirst for knowledge, and the views that she was to express in adulthood suggest that she may well have absorbed some of the early feminist beliefs that were being propounded at this time. She certainly had a precocious talent for writing, which was later to find expression in her correspondence with some of the brightest stars of the Georgian literary world. But for now she enjoyed the traditional upbringing of a nobleman’s daughter in the privileged confines of Blickling, surrounded by her many siblings.

  The Hobart family’s life seemed to be largely dictated by the forceful personality of Sir Henry. His quick temper and dictatorial manner were well known throughout the county and had won him respect and enemies in equal measure. They also ultimately led to his death. The only two portraits that Sir Henry commissioned were both of himself alone, and none of his wife or any of his eight children is known to have been painted during his lifetime. It may of course be that these were subsequently sold or lost, but it would be consistent with Sir Henry’s character that he should dominate the portraiture at Blickling as much as he did his family’s daily life there.

  If the rumours put about by Hobart’s adversaries were true, then this same self-interest extended to the family’s finances. He was said to have deprived his wife of her rightful income and subjected her to a life of comparative hardship in order to fund his own extravagant lifestyle. Archbishop Prideaux told a fellow churchman: ‘Here is a lady of one of ye best families in ye countrey who hath all her fortune in his hands, and he hath not payd her any interest these severall years, whereby she is put to great hardships for her subsistence.’16

  Yet the grief that his death caused at Blickling suggests a genuine love and tenderness between Sir Henry and his wife and children. That Henrietta would cherish a fondness for Blickling for the rest of her life provides a testament to the happiness of her early family life there. The tenacity with which her mother pursued Sir Henry’s murderer, who was eventually brought to justice in 1700, proves the sincerity of her love. So too the sums that were lavished on his funeral, despite the family’s straitened circumstances. The household accounts include an order for a coffin lined with six yards of white baize, and the craftsmen spent two full days cutting out the inscription. Nine escutcheons were painted for the funeral and nine gold rings were bought for the bearer and minister, along with gloves of Cordova leather, fine black cloth, crape, silk hatbands, black silk hose, cotton stockings and a mourning sword.17 Lady Hobart also ordered a monument to be erected on the spot where her husband fell.18 It would mark the last duel ever fought in Norfolk.

  With Sir Henry’s mortal remains interred in the family vault at Blickling church, his wife had to shoulder the considerable burden of managing a large family and a debt-ridden estate alone. The eldest of her seven girls were the twins Mary and Anne, aged thirteen, and the youngest, Catherine, was just two months old. The only son and heir, John, was four years old and therefore far too young to take on the inheritance that would one day be his.

  The list of Sir Henry’s creditors had been steadily growing throughout the 1690s, and a number of the individual sums that he owed were substantial. The year before his death, one of his creditors had ridden in person to Blickling to serve a bill of £8,000 on the baronet. Hobart’s old adversary, Prideaux, had predicted with barely disguised glee that this would ‘reach a great part of his estate’.19 Although many of Hobart’s debts were associated with his expensive political campaigns, there were still more generated by the day-to-day running of Blickling Hall. The elegant new Jacobean house built by Sir John Hobart earlier in the century was now in need of repair, and the family accounts are riddled with bills for emergency works. Ongoing maintenance, such as thatching, added further to the Hobart family’s debts, as did window taxes (whereby owners had to pay a set amount per window, making it cripplingly expensive for a property the size of Blickling) and estate staff. While the estate itself generated a reasonable amount of income from tenants and livestock, this was not enough to cover the mounting debts. Neither had Sir Henry left his wife and children sufficient financial provision in his will: all of it was tied up with the management of his lands and estates.20

  Less than a year after her husband’s death, Lady Hobart was forced to borrow money from local businessmen in order to make ends meet.21 It was also rumoured that she planned to escape financial ruin by marrying again, and, within a year of the funeral, several rich men were named as prospective husbands. If Lady Hobart had such plans, they came to nothing. With no dowry, a notoriously encumbered estate, and a large number of dependents, she did not present an alluring prospect to the eligible noblemen of Norfolk, regardless of what her physical attractions might have been.22

  Faced with mounting debts and a beleaguered estate, Lady Hobart had no choice but to seek help through her family connections. Her grandfather, Sir John Maynard, had been a famous judge and Member of Parliament, and had retained office as councillor to various governments during the turbulent periods of the Civil War, Commonwealth, Restoration and Glorious Revolution of 1688. He had married, as his fourth wife, Mary Charleton of Apley Castle. After his death, she had made another good match, to Henry Howard, 5th Earl of Suffolk. This made her one of the richest relations that Lady Hobart had, and although their family connection was somewhat tenuous, she wrote to ask for her assistance. To her delight, the Countess of Suffolk invited her granddaughter by marriage to spend the summer of 1699 at Gunnersbury House, which she had inherited from her first husband. Lady Hobart gratefully accepted, and she and her children duly made their way there.

  Sir John Maynard had purchased Gunnersbury at the height of his fame. There had been an estate there since the Middle Ages. Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III, had lived there for a time, and it had subsequently passed to various other distinguished owners. In 1658, Sir John Maynard commissioned John Webb, a pupil of Inigo Jones, one of the most celebrated architects of the seventeenth century, to build a magnificent new house in the style of a Palladian villa. It was completed five years later and was one of the finest houses for miles around. It stood on a raised terrace in the surrounding parkland and commanded a much-admired view towards the Thames and beyond to Kew and Richmond. ‘From the portico in the back front of the house, you have an exceeding fine prospect of the county of Surrey, the River Thames, and all the meadows on the borders for some miles, as also a good prospect of London, in clear weather,’ enthused the writer Daniel Defoe.23 At first-floor level was an elegant Corinthian portico, which looked out over a formal forecourt. The interior was no less impressive, with its grand imperial staircase, richly ornate saloon, and lavish furniture
and tapestries throughout.24

  Elizabeth Hobart and her eight young children lived in some considerable comfort at Gunnersbury and enjoyed the company offered by the Countess and her elderly husband. They were to make several more visits over the coming years, which in itself was a considerable feat given that it was almost 150 miles from Blickling. In an age when travel by road was still agonisingly slow, not to mention uncomfortable and dangerous, the journey would have taken at least a week.

  Living at Gunnersbury gave Lady Hobart some much-needed respite from the onerous duties of running the Blickling estate. But it was not long before tragedy again blighted her family. In August 1701, during one of the family’s sojourns at Gunnersbury, she was taken ill with what proved to be the final symptoms of consumption. Her condition worsened rapidly and she died on 22 August, three years to the day since her husband’s death.25

  The seven young Hobart girls and their brother were now orphaned. As the only son, John had inherited Blickling on his father’s death, but being then just four years old, the estates were given over to trustees, who would administer them until he came of age fourteen years later. Protracted minorities such as these were always unsettling for estates, and this one was made worse by the financial burdens under which the family was struggling. Their prospects were now far from favourable.

  Shortly after the death of their mother, the Hobart children moved back to Blickling. Although they returned to Gunnersbury the following summer, the trouble and expense of doing so meant that for the most part they stayed in Norfolk.26 The link with the Suffolks was maintained by the terms of Sir John Maynard’s will, which obliged the Countess (who was the trustee) to draw down the twice-yearly allowances for the Hobart children.27 But the Earl and Countess of Suffolk remained rather distant figures in the lives of the children, and it was the two eldest, the twins Mary and Anne (now aged sixteen), who took charge of their upbringing.