by Tracy Borman
Much as she yearned to join her friends at Marble Hill, Henrietta was delighted by their obvious enjoyment of her new house, which was detailed in the many accounts that they sent her. Their lively party was broken up in August, when Swift returned to Ireland. His departure was greatly lamented. ‘Tis a sensation like that of a limb lopp’d off,’ Pope told him. ‘One is trying every minute unawares to use it, and finds it is not.’39 Henrietta was now among the circle of Swift’s English friends who wrote to him regularly, and sometimes they composed joint missives for his entertainment. One of the most amusing was a recipe for ‘Stewing Veal’, which was laden with nonsensical puns. Its inspiration was the fact that Swift had complimented Pope’s cook on the veal stew that she had served during a supper party at Twickenham. His friends used the recipe as a metaphor for the ingredients they thought should go into his sermons. It was written in Gay’s hand, but there were contributions from Pope, Bolingbroke, Pulteney and Henrietta. They urged him to cut these up ‘in a few pieces’ in order to make them more palatable for the congregation.
Swift thanked them for it, but said he wished ‘the measure of Ingredients may prove better than of the Verses’, and added that he would like a recipe for ‘a Chicken in a wooden Bowl from Mrs Howard, upon which you may likewise exercise your Poetry, for the Ladys here object against both’.40 Not wishing to be outdone on the rhyming stakes, he ended with a short verse lamenting the recent misfortunes that had befallen his friends in England:
Here four of you got mischances to plague you
Friend Congreve a Feaver, Friend Howard an Ague
Friend Pope overturned by driving too fast away
And Robin at Sea had like to be cast away.
Swift may have numbered Henrietta among the friends whom he missed now that he was back in Dublin, but his interest in her was not entirely selfless. Tired of being so far away from the centre of political life, he hankered after a place at court. Despite assuring his new friend that he was ‘no Courtier, nor have anything to ask’, he clearly saw her as one of the best means to advancement.41 He expressed his delight that the Princess had shown him such favour when he had been at Leicester House, although he claimed that he had not sought it: ‘For I am not such a prostitute flatterer as Gulliver, whose chief study is to extenuate the vices and magnify the virtues of mankind.’ He begged Mrs Howard to make sure that her favour would continue now that he was back in Ireland.
Henrietta served Swift well, not just with the Princess (who encouraged their correspondence), but with the court in general. ‘My correspondents have informed me that your Ladyship has done me the honour to answer severall objections that ignorance, malice, and party have made to my Travells,’ he wrote in November 1726, ‘and bin so charitable as to justifie the fidelity and veracity of the Author.’ Grateful for her assistance, he added: ‘This zeal you have shown for Truth calls for my particular thankes, and at the same time encourages me to beg you would continue your goodness to me.’ Realising the importance of retaining Mrs Howard’s favour, Swift showered her with witty and amusing letters to fill her tedious hours at court. He even threw in a bit of romance for good measure, going so far as to suggest marriage – something that he could hardly promise, given his ecclesiastical duties. Henrietta was well aware of his insincerity and gave short shrift to his ridiculous proposal. ‘I had rather you and I were dumb as well as deaf for even then that shou’d happen,’ she admonished him.42 Suitably chastened, Swift resorted to less romantic means to win her favour in future.
Diverting though his letters were, Henrietta had more pressing matters to attend to at court, for her husband Charles was once again making trouble. He had been fighting a protracted and costly legal battle with his brother, Edward, for the past few years. When the 7th Earl of Suffolk died in 1722, he complicated the succession by settling Audley End House and estate on Charles, who was the younger of his two uncles, thereby passing over Edward, who succeeded to the earldom. Edward contested the will, and the two brothers fought it out in the courts, running up huge costs in the process. Eventually, in June 1725, they entered into articles of agreement whereby Charles could retain the house and estate on condition that he paid Edward £1,200 out of the rents and profits. He was also to bear all the legal costs. Although Charles agreed to this, he did not put the necessary arrangements in place to levy the annual payments out of the estate, and two years later his brother was still pressing for them.
Rather than sort out the estate, Charles preferred an option that was both simpler and, for him, more entertaining: to torment his wife until she agreed to give him the money. That Henrietta was using the Prince’s generous gift to build herself a house away from court was no longer a secret. Charles knew how much she valued her independence, and would therefore also have guessed how much the house meant to her. He could not have been presented with a more perfect means of blackmailing her.
‘Mr Howard, having a mind to turn his reputed cuckoldom to the best account, began to give his wife fresh trouble,’ related Lord Hervey, ‘and in order to make her pay for staying abroad pretended an inclination to have her return home.’43 Enlisting the support of George I, who was ever glad of an opportunity to annoy his son, Charles wrote to Princess Caroline in the spring of 1727, telling her that he had ‘again receiv’d his positive directions, that she immediately retires from her Employment under your Royal Highnesse’. He professed his ‘unhappinesse in this difficulty’, claiming that he would not have dared put forward such a request had it not been expressly commanded by the King.44 The Princess showed the letter to Mrs Howard, who immediately sent back a terse response to say he had indicated neither where she should go nor in what manner he would provide for her if she left her mistress’s service.
But Charles was not to be bowed by his wife’s defiance, and assured her that ‘all attempts you can use to the Contrary will be in vain’.45 Besides, he had a few more tactics up his sleeve. One of them was to call upon the highest ecclesiastical power in the land to help fight his case. William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, was not of a mind to be drawn into an affair that had all the makings of a public scandal. He also distrusted the man who had just related the tale of his wife’s disobedience. On the other hand, he strongly disapproved of marital infidelity, particularly when it concerned the heir to the throne. He was also aware that if Mr Howard chose to invoke the law, there was not a court in the land that would support the wife against the husband, regardless of who her lover was. He therefore wrote to the Princess of Wales, urging that her husband’s and the King’s honour were at stake because if Charles pursued his case through the law, it would ‘make a great noise’. Wake concluded that he hoped she would take ‘some method to prevent any such writ being brought to your House by getting the Lady out of it’.46
The Princess did not particularly want to endure a public scandal, but she was determined to keep Henrietta at court in order to maintain the delicate balance of power. She cleverly replied that if Mrs Howard wished to return to her husband then she would willingly release her – a thing that she knew full well was the last thing on earth her Woman of the Bedchamber would ever do.
Henrietta used all her powers of reason in attempting to make Charles drop his case. She reminded him that when she had left their apartments at St James’s following the royal quarrel, he had ‘directly dismissed’ and ‘absolutely discharged’ her, saying that he never wanted to see her again. ‘What refuge more safe, more honourable or more rational can a wife so abandoned by her Husband have recourse than to Continue in the service of the Princesse of Wales,’ she argued. Knowing full well that reason alone would not work with her husband, however, she sought the intervention of the Hobart family solicitor, Dr James Welwood, who went in person to try to persuade him. Unfortunately, this served only to provoke him further. Welwood told Mrs Howard that Charles had appeared ‘highly incensed’ and had fiercely denied the allegation that he had abandoned her. He therefore advised her to remain calm and sit it o
ut until her husband tired of the whole affair.
He had reckoned without the tenacity of Mr Howard, who had his eyes on a much greater prize than his wife’s return and was not about to give up so easily. Believing that if he caused enough embarrassment, either his wife or the Prince would pay him off, he resorted to increasingly dirty tactics, warning Henrietta that her continued disobedience threatened to ruin their son’s reputation, and that the boy had been greatly upset by the whole sorry affair. ‘How ungratefull and shocking A part he must share in life, to hear the reproaches of your Publick defiance to me, and what the World will interpret the occasion of it,’ he surmised, concluding that she should give up her case at once if she cared at all for the ‘small Posterity of A child you seem’d to love’. His words must have wounded Henrietta deeply, but she refused to allow him to use their son as a pawn in his evil game. ‘You mention Sir a tender subject indeed, my Child,’ she replied. ‘I wish to God he was of a riper age to be Judge between us, I can not but flatter my self he would have more Duty and humanity than to desire to see his Mother exposed to misery and want.’ She berated her husband for using the young boy in ‘ye disputes yt have hapned between his father and mother’ in order that he could pursue his ‘precarious expectation of court favours’, and begged him to speak no more of this ‘preposterous reconciliation’.47
But Charles knew that he had hit upon one of the surest means of distressing his wife, and he continued to bait her on the subject. Scorning her ‘feigned’ tenderness towards her son, he told her that the boy would never choose her over his father. ‘No artifice, or Temptation of Reward upon earth, will ever Prevaile with him to desert me, or disobey my Injunctions.’ Henrietta replied that she ‘hardly dare trust my weakness upon that subject’, but insisted that although Henry’s tender age made him ‘susceptible of impression good or bad’ she could not believe that he would ‘persevere in forgetting he has a mother’. What she then went on to say was a testament to the grief that she had suffered over her son – as well as the depth of her hatred for his father. ‘I am not willing to sopose he will long neglect a parent who has not forfeited ye duty he owes her but if this of all other evils is yet reserved for me I must bear it with patience and submit to my fate,’ she wrote. ‘If I were now to dye he might say he had a mother to whom he had not paid the respect yt was due, so on the other side if he deserts me however lamentable the stroke is to me, I must and will think as in cases of mortality that I once had a Son.’48
This statement put paid to any further attempts by Charles to use their son against her. If she was prepared to give him up for good rather than submit to her husband’s demands, then it was futile to pursue this line of argument any longer. Henrietta was playing a dangerous game. The ensuing years would prove that she had far from given up hope of reclaiming her son, but she knew it was vital to convey this impression now in order for Charles to spare him the shame of being involved in their increasingly public battle.
Furious that what he had assumed was a certain route to victory had backfired on him, Charles resorted to the only other means he could think of: violence. He managed to secure a warrant from the Lord Chief Justice which gave him the right to seize his wife ‘wherever he found her’. ‘This step so alarmed Mrs Howard,’ observed Lord Hervey, ‘who feared nothing so much as falling again into his hands’, that she became a virtual prisoner at Leicester House.49 She knew that she was safe from Charles as long as she remained there, for it was surely too extreme a measure – even for him – to attempt to take his wife by force out of the Prince of Wales’s palace.
This confinement could not last for long, however. Summer was fast approaching, and with it the royal household’s traditional removal to Richmond. This presented a very real danger for Henrietta. Etiquette would not allow a mere Woman of the Bedchamber to travel in the Princess’s coach. She would therefore have to follow behind in a much less secure carriage, which it would have been all too easy for Charles to ambush. Neither could the royal party travel in secret: their annual pilgrimage to Richmond attracted thousands of spectators, and the magnificence of their stately procession did not exactly blend in with the surroundings. Henrietta therefore hatched a plan with her friends the Duke of Argyll and Lord Ilay to make her escape to Richmond in one of their coaches. They would leave early in the morning, some four hours before the royal coach. Once there, she would be lodged at Argyll’s house in Petersham, rather than in the residence close to Richmond Lodge that she had recently shared with the Maids of Honour.
The plan worked brilliantly, and Mrs Howard was soon safely installed at the Duke of Argyll’s house. The whole experience had terrified her, however, and even now she did not dare to set foot outside her safe house. ‘I have not been abroad since I left London,’ she wrote to Dr Welwood, apparently having been excused from her duties to Caroline, ‘nor have I Courage yet to venture out.’50 Her terror must have been great indeed, for not even the prospect of seeing her beloved Marble Hill again could incite her to leave Argyll’s house. It was a miserable summer that she spent there, knowing that the manifestation of her independence was taking shape, brick by brick, just a few minutes away down river, and tormented by the thought that she might never be able to enjoy it. Her friends shared some of her frustration. ‘Really it is the most mortifying thing in nature, that we can neither get into the court to live with you, nor you get into the country to live with us,’ Pope wrote to her from nearby Twickenham, ‘so we will take up with what we can get that belongs to you, and make ourselves as happy as we can, in your house.’51
Work at Marble Hill was progressing apace, and it was now so near completion that Henrietta had engaged a housekeeper and established a small farm in the grounds to supply the house with fresh milk, eggs and other dairy produce. While she was confined at Petersham, her friends were able to take full advantage of the daily improvements that were being made to her new home. Pope was a frequent visitor to the house, and tried to keep his friend’s spirits up by supplying her with regular updates on its progress. ‘We cannot omit taking this occasion to congratulate you upon the increase of your family,’ he wrote, ‘for your Cow is this morning very happily delivered of the better sort, I mean a female calf; she is like her mother as she can stare . . . We have given her the name of Caesar’s wife, Calf-urnia; imagining, that as Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, this Roman lady was suckled by a cow, from whence she took that name.’ He went on to say that he and Gay had celebrated this momentous event with a ‘cold dinner’ at the house, which included wine, meat, fish and ‘the lettice of a greak Island, called Cos’. He added: ‘We have some thoughts of dining there to morrow, to celebrate the day after the birth-day, and on friday to celebrate the day after that, where we intend to entertain Dean Swift.’51
Pope’s exuberance was premature. Shortly after he had dispatched this letter, events at court brought work on Mrs Howard’s beloved house to a sudden halt.
Chapter 10
‘Dunce the second reigns like
Dunce the first’
* * *
ON 13 NOVEMBER 1726, Sophia Dorothea, estranged wife of George I, died at Ahlden Castle, where she had been held captive for thirty-three years. The King celebrated the occasion by making a rare public visit to the theatre with his mistresses on the very day that he received the news. But for all his bravado, he was secretly troubled by a prophecy that had been told to him some time before, that he would follow his wife to the grave within a year.
The following summer, he announced that he was once again going to visit his beloved German dominions, and on 3 June he set off with his favourite mistress, Madame Schulenburg. Five days later, he had reached Delden, on the border with Germany, where he rested at the house of a local nobleman. In high spirits at the prospect of his imminent arrival at Herrenhausen, he ate an enormous supper, which included several watermelons. His host urged him to stay the night and give his stomach chance to digest the feast, but George was impatient to reach O
snabrück, the palace of his birth, and set off again at full speed in the early hours of the morning.
According to a contemporary account, just as the royal coach was about to depart, somebody threw into it an old letter from Sophia Dorothea lamenting her cruel fate and reminding her husband of the prophecy about his death.1 Whether it was this or the surfeit of watermelons is not certain, but shortly afterwards the King was seized by an ‘apoplectick fitt’ of such violence that he fell to the floor of the coach. Greatly alarmed, his attendants brought the coach to an abrupt halt and prepared to carry him to a place of refuge. But George, by now furious in his impatience, urged the coachmen to speed on with the journey, crying: ‘To Osnabrück, to Osnabrück!’
As the coach thundered along the treacherous roads, jolting the anxious passengers within, the King fell in and out of consciousness. His attendants looked on in panic, certain that he could not cling to life much longer. Finally, late into the following night, the castle of Osnabrück came into view, and upon arrival George I was borne at once to the bedchamber. No sooner had he been laid out on the bed than he was seized with a ‘violent cholick of which he suffer’d very much for about 30 hours’.2 His long struggle came to an end as the clock struck midnight on 11 June, and he breathed his last in the very room in which he had been born, sixty-seven years earlier. The prophecy thus fulfilled, Sophia Dorothea had won her revenge, albeit from beyond the grave.