King's Mistress, Queen's Servant: The Life and Times of Henrietta Howard
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Mary Bellenden’s decided rejection of the Prince’s advances may seem surprising given the prestige that could be gained from a liaison with him. But she was in fact already deeply in love with another. Colonel John Campbell was one of the Prince’s Grooms of the Bedchamber, and Mary had been instantly attracted to him. The Prince suspected that her affections lay elsewhere and tried to cajole her into revealing the identity of her lover by promising that he would do what he could for the couple, provided that she agreed not to marry without his sanction. Mary assented to the latter part of the bargain but would not tell him who her lover was. Then, fearing that he would discover it anyway and break up their liaison, she promptly did exactly what she had promised not to and married Colonel Campbell in secret. The Prince never forgave her, and whenever she appeared at court after that, ‘tho trembling at what she knew she was to undergo’, he always stepped up to her and ‘whispered some very harsh reproach in her ear’.6
According to Hervey, Henrietta spied the opportunity created by Miss Bellenden’s rejection of the Prince and stepped in to take her place in his affections. ‘By this conduct she left Mrs Howard, who had more steadiness and more perseverance, to try what she could make of a game which the other had found so tedious and unprofitable that she had no pleasure in playing it and saw little to be won by minding it.’7 It seems unlikely, however that Henrietta set out to excite the Prince’s passion in such a calculated fashion. Although living apart from her husband, she still took her marriage vows seriously, and her decision to leave him had only been made after the fiercest of battles with her conscience. She had been anxious to protect her reputation and avoid any further scandal, and had succeeded in winning respect throughout the court as a modest and virtuous woman.
It is doubtful that the Prince presented a more appealing prospect to her than he had to Mary Bellenden. His physical charms were rather limited. Always on the short and stout side, his figure had not benefited from the lavish dining that he had enjoyed during his years at court. Neither had his countenance been improved by the frequent bouts of rage that consumed him, which would inevitably cause his face to turn a deep red and his already bulbous eyes to bulge even more. Whenever his temper was severely provoked, he would make a ridiculous spectacle of himself by stamping and kicking his wig around the room: hardly the Prince Charming of romantic legend.
But for all that, the Prince of Wales was of course irresistible in one important respect: he offered the chance of prestige and influence at court. This was a seductive prospect for Henrietta, whose memories of poverty and deprivation were still fresh in her mind. As her friend Horace Walpole shrewdly observed: ‘nor do I suppose that love had any share in the sacrifice she made of her virtue. She had felt poverty, and was far from disliking power.’8 She therefore began to encourage the Prince’s increasingly obvious advances.
Love did not seem to feature very highly in the Prince’s actions either. While he flirted with the ladies at court, he was passionately in love with his wife, and even after thirteen years of marriage still preferred her bed to any other. He would hasten there every evening after dinner, and whenever business took him away from court, he would whisk Caroline off to the royal bedchamber as soon as he returned, much to the ribaldry and amusement of the courtiers standing by. No other woman was even fit to ‘buckle her shoe’, he once said, and this was borne out by all of his actions.
Nevertheless, George, like his father, thought it essential to enhance his royal status (not to mention his male dignity) by cultivating an image as a man of gallantry. From the very earliest times, kings had taken mistresses, whether for status, companionship or physical gratification. Far from being hidden away, these mistresses often came to enjoy positions of influence at court. They had close and easy access to the King, and were often confidantes and advisers as well as lovers. As such, they represented one of the surest means for statesmen, officials and ambitious place-hunters to gain favour with the sovereign. If a mistress fell pregnant, it was not uncommon for their bastard offspring to be given high-ranking positions or prestigious estates. One of the most lustful British kings of recent times had been Charles II, whose court was filled with the most beautiful women in Europe. Some of his former mistresses still frequented the early Georgian court, as did those of his successors. For example, the Duchess of Portsmouth bumped into Lady Dorchester, mistress of James II, and Lady Orkney, mistress of William III at a drawing room one evening. ‘Who would have thought that we three whores should have met here!’ the latter is said to have exclaimed.9
With such an impressive track record set by his royal forebears, Prince George was not about to let the side down. Furthermore, he was anxious to demonstrate by taking a mistress that he was not ruled by his wife. Horace Walpole derided him for being ‘more attracted by a silly idea he had entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety; & he added the more egregious folly of fancying that his Inconstancy proved he was not governed’. A mistress was therefore as important a part of his household as a valet, coachman or Groom of the Stole. As Lord Hervey observed, the Prince seemed to ‘look upon a mistress rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man’.10
Necessary she may have been, but it was equally imperative that a mistress should do nothing to disturb the rigid orders and ceremonials of the Prince’s daily life. Henrietta was ideal in this respect. She was patient and compliant, and George rightly supposed that she would give him little trouble. Her discretion was an added bonus and would prevent any unnecessary tittle-tattle about his prowess as a lover.
The affair between Mrs Howard and the Prince of Wales was therefore born less of passion than of convenience. George was expected to take a mistress, so he chose one who would cause as little disruption to the order of his life as possible. Henrietta, meanwhile, was prepared to fulfil the role in expectation that it would augment her position at court and secure her future prosperity.
There are no surviving love letters or other contemporary accounts that suggest a tender or prolonged courtship. The affair probably began during the Prince and Princess’s stay at Richmond, from June to September 1718. The atmosphere among the royal household was always more relaxed and convivial during these annual retreats, and the formal public occasions tended to be replaced by more intimate supper parties or evening strolls around the gardens and parkland surrounding the Lodge. The potential for discreet romantic liaisons was therefore greater than amidst the public formalities of Leicester House and St James’s.
Princess Caroline was somewhat indisposed that summer, as she was expecting her seventh child and the pregnancy was proving a troublesome one.11 Whether this prompted George to seek diversion elsewhere, or whether the long, sultry days during which he was surrounded by the alluring ladies of his wife’s household sharpened his sexual appetite, is not certain. Whichever was the case, he now became fixated with ‘pretty Mrs Howard’, the modest and attractive lady whom he had first met four years earlier in Hanover.
The first indication that their relationship had developed from the platonic to the physical was an observation by a contemporary at court that the Prince had started to spend every evening (some ‘three or four hours’) in her apartments. At first they were joined by Miss Bellenden and some of the Princess’s other ladies, but after a time his visits became ‘uninterrupted tête-à-têtes’ with Mrs Howard. In his diary of court events, Lord Egmont noted with some astonishment that George would ‘spend hours alone with her when none else was admitted’. Their affair was conducted with the clockwork regularity so typical of the Prince. Onlookers at court noted that he would enter Henrietta’s apartments at precisely seven o’clock every evening ‘with such dull punctuality, that he frequently walked about his chamber for ten minutes with his watch in his hand, if the stated minute was not arrived’.12
Exactly how the Prince and Mrs Howard passed the three or four hours every evening alone together was a source of mu
ch speculation among the courtiers and politicians who hung about in the public rooms beyond. The rather clinical way in which he conducted the liaison, always with one eye on the clock, led some to doubt that he ‘entered into any commerce with her, that he might not innocently have had with his daughter’.13 The punctuality of the Prince’s visits should not necessarily be taken as evidence of a lack of passion, however, for he was obsessed with routine and measured his movements by the clock. Just as he visited Henrietta at the same time every evening, so he always retired to his wife’s bed for two hours after dinner, which was always taken at the same hour, and even the slightest deviation from his accustomed habits would send him into a fury.
Moreover, the Prince lacked the subtlety to conduct an affair purely for show and, in contrast to his new mistress, was not given to concealing his true emotions. ‘The fire of his temper appeared in every look and gesture,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘which, being under the direction of a small understanding, was every day throwing him upon some indiscretion.’14 He was also of a very lascivious nature and sought women’s company for physical rather than intellectual stimulation. Lord Chesterfield wrote of the ‘animal spirits’ which governed his actions, and Horace Walpole observed that ‘unfortunately his Majesty’s passions were too indelicate to have been confined to platonic love for a Woman’. He dismissed as ‘a ridiculous pretence’ the notion that theirs was a ‘meer friendship’, and pointed out that George was ‘the last man in the world to have taste for talking sentiments, and that with a woman who was deaf!’15
The early Georgian court was, besides, hardly a temple of morality. Sex, scandal, flirtation, infidelity, intrigues and elopements were as much a part of daily life as the formal levees, dinners, drawing rooms and other ceremonials. Masquerade balls, which were a regular occurrence at Leicester House, became a cover for wanton behaviour. They presented infinite possibilities for amorous encounters, as masks and costumes released guests from the strict decorum that usually governed social occasions. Sultans were seen making love to nuns, and not all of the nuns were female. John James Heidegger, who as Master of the Revels presided over these gatherings, was denounced by a Middlesex jury as the source of all vice and immorality. In an effort to placate such prudish opinion, masquerades were subsequently renamed ridottos, but nothing else about them changed.
The ladies of the Princess’s household were esteemed more for their beauty and vivacity than for their virtue. Prudery was viewed as a singularly unattractive quality in women. Pope wrote of it in a verse dedicated to the Maids of Honour at court:
What is prudery?
’Tis a beldam
Seen with wit and beauty seldom.
’Tis a virgin hard of feature,
Old and void of all good nature
Most of these ladies were maids in name only and had precious little honour. Sophia Howe’s wild spirits caused many lively scenes at Leicester House, and she also wreaked havoc during her visits to the country. She wrote to Henrietta on one such sojourn: ‘You will think I supose that I have had no flirtation since I am here but you will be mistaken,’ and went on to boast of her various conquests.16 Soon after her return to court, Miss Howe fell for the charms of a young gallant, Anthony Lowther, and eloped with him. But Lowther proved unworthy of the lady’s affections, treating her cruelly and refusing to marry her. She was therefore forced to return to her mother’s house, her reputation in tatters, and died – it is said of a broken heart – a few years later.
Sophia was far from being the only girl of uncertain virtue at court. Miss Mary Chamber, another friend of Henrietta, was devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and regaled her with lurid tales of her adventures. ‘All sorts of Diversions are in great plenty here,’ she once wrote from Tunbridge Wells, ‘but I think Ravishing is the most prevailing entertainment.’ She also recounted a trial that was the talk of the town, in which a man had been accused of forcing himself upon a woman. The case had been thrown out when the judge had asked the ‘victim’ to name the time and place that the accident had occurred, and she had answered ‘that was impossible for her to tell because it lasted for a quarter of a year together’. Margaret Bradshaw, meanwhile, who was a relative of Mrs Howard, boasted to her that she fully expected to find favour with the King when she visited court, ‘for my Bubbys are mightily grown since you saw me’. She added: ‘I veryly beleve if he were once in my Parlour, & I in good humour he’d never go home again, for I have very wining ways with me when I think fitt to show my parts which I wont do to every body.’17
In such an environment, the likelihood of a platonic liaison between a highly sexed prince and an attractive Woman of the Bedchamber was slim indeed. Lord Hervey may have tried to downplay the affair out of loyalty to Princess Caroline, but Henrietta was far from being mistress in name only. Her closest friends knew the truth, although, as Horace Walpole observed, they pretended not to. ‘From the propriety & decency of her behaviour [she] was always treated as if her virtue had never been question’d, her friends even affecting to suppose that her connection [with the Prince] had been confined to pure friendship.’18 Henrietta’s irreverent cousin, Margaret Bradshaw, showed no such discretion and teased her about the loss of her virtue: ‘A Courtier is a detestable thing & I am glad none of my famely are so, for lett people come of Ever such honest parents, they are soon corruptyed. Mrs Howard’s father was a sure naile [but] his Daughter proves a rotten Pegg.’19
There may have been another, more compelling, piece of evidence that the affair between the Prince of Wales and Henrietta Howard was of a sexual nature. Within her correspondence are two letters which contain the merest hint of a pregnancy. In August 1718, Carr, Lord Hervey, whose younger brother John kept him informed of events at court, wrote to Henrietta at Richmond: ‘the most pleasing account I can have from Richmond will be that of your being in good health, & not wanting to be told you are grown bulky’. This may of course have been a light-hearted warning that she should avoid ruining her famously slim figure by overindulging in the rich foods that were on offer at court, and on its own it is certainly not enough to indicate that she was thought to be with child. But then a few months later, in May 1719, Mrs Howard received a letter from the daughter of James Welwood, her trusted Hobart family solicitor whom she had known since childhood. The postscript of the letter, apparently written in haste, reads: ‘I wont say a word of the cradle.’20
There are no further references to this, and in fact Henrietta’s correspondence becomes very patchy between the autumn of 1718 and the summer of 1719. This in itself may be significant, but it cannot be taken as reliable proof that she had borne her royal lover a child during that time. What is more convincing in this respect is that George was rumoured to have awarded Henrietta an annual pension of £2,000 from around the time that their affair began. This was a considerable sum (equivalent to more than £250,000 today), particularly for a man not renowned for his generosity. There is no trace of it in the official records, although the Treasury Papers for the year 1718 indicate that the Prince granted her an additional allowance of £100 per year, and several similar amounts are recorded in the years that follow. These papers also show that her apartments were made more comfortable by the addition of such luxuries as crimson silk-lined curtains and mahogany furniture.21 Again, taken on their own, these gifts and grants of money indicate nothing more than that Mrs Howard was a favourite of the Prince, and are not substantial enough proof that they were intended to help support a child.
There is also the question of whether Henrietta, however discreet she was, would have been able to hide a pregnancy from the prying eyes of court. The full-skirted dresses that were then in fashion would have helped to conceal the physical signs. Furthermore, although she was required to be in more or less constant attendance, she was often reported to be indisposed, and on one occasion she had to be excused from duty for several weeks. If she had given birth during this time, then the child could quite easily have been passed off as her
brother’s. John Hobart had married in 1717, and his wife Judith had produced a child almost every year after that. The births and baptisms of five of the seven children were recorded in the register of Blickling church. The two exceptions were Robert, who died in infancy, and Dorothy, who was one of only two Hobart children to survive into adulthood.
This latter child would later come to live with Henrietta at court, following the death of John Hobart’s wife in 1727. Although she was fond of children in general, Henrietta showed a partiality towards Dorothy that would last a lifetime. In the only known surviving portrait of the girl, there are striking similarities with the facial features of George II. She has the same large, almost bulbous eyes, together with a long straight nose and high forehead. Her appearance is also similar to that of George II’s daughters by Caroline, in particular Princess Amelia.
The fact that it is almost impossible to say for certain whether Henrietta bore her royal lover’s child poses an interesting question in itself. Royal bastards were hardly shocking: indeed, it had long been common for kings and princes to openly acknowledge and provide for them. They were, after all, valuable proof of their virility. So why would Henrietta try to conceal a pregnancy? That she had a husband was not reason enough on its own. There are many examples of married royal mistresses throughout history, and besides, Henrietta was already estranged from Charles. Furthermore, as the Prince’s official mistress, it was a little late to be overcome by an attack of morality. But then Charles Howard was a violent man, and it is possible that Henrietta dared not risk provoking him by allowing it to be common knowledge that she was having another man’s child. She may also have feared that this would prejudice her son Henry against her, and would make it even less likely that she could win custody of him.