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

by Tracy Borman

  The family member whose presence Henrietta missed most, however, was her son Henry. Almost thirteen years had passed since she had last seen him, and during that time she had been able to glean precious little news of him. Thanks to her friends outside court, she had learned that he had been sent to a private school in 1720 under the tutelage of Dr Samuel Dunster, a High Church parson who had a living in Paddington. He had subsequently followed the traditional education of a young nobleman by attending Cambridge, where he had been enrolled as a student at Magdalene College in 1725 at the age of eighteen.

  Lord Peterborough had discovered that the boy had been sent to an academy in Paris after graduating from university. At Henrietta’s entreaty, he had changed the plans he had had for his own son so that he could enrol him at the same place and thus secure regular reports of his welfare. Peterborough had also hoped that his son might speak favourably to the young man of his mother, and thereby undo some of the damage that Charles’s evil influence had wreaked. The fact that there are no further references to him in Peterborough’s correspondence suggests that the plan failed. Nor is there any evidence that Henry ever tried to contact his mother directly after he returned to England in 1728. He had not lost touch with his family altogether, though, for that same year he was elected the Member of Parliament for Bere Alston in Devon, which was part of the Maynard family estate. Henrietta’s brother, John, had inherited it in 1720 and wielded a strong influence in the local elections, which suggests that he helped his nephew to secure the seat. Whether he thereby hoped to engineer a reconciliation between his sister and her son is not certain.

  If Henry was grateful for the advantage he had gained from his mother’s connections, he did not show it. His father had evidently done too good a job in raising him to hate her. This is borne out by references in letters from Henrietta’s friends. Pope was aghast at ‘the odd usage of Mr Howard to his son’, but tried to reassure Henrietta that Henry would surely have inherited enough of her own good nature to resist his father’s attempts to warp him. It soon became clear, though, that he had adopted his father’s attitude towards her, as well as a fair portion of his nature. Indeed, he had evidently made this aversion so clear that she had been afraid to encounter him. When Lord Bathurst invited her to stay with him at Cirencester in the summer of 1734, she at first resisted on the grounds that she had heard her son was there, and asked Pope to find out if this were true. Bathurst wrote at once to reassure her: ‘My castle is not molested by your fair son.’10 Henrietta’s fear of Henry must have been real indeed for her to have changed from longing to see him to doing all she could to avoid him.

  The ever-increasing certainty that her son was lost to her for ever must have caused Henrietta great anguish during her long hours of solitude. Weighed down by this sadness, and weary of her life at court, she had a further reason to wish to be free of it. The waning of George II’s affections towards her had until now only manifested itself in the occasional outburst of temper. Much as he loved the routine of their liaison, he was growing tired of his long-term mistress. Her body was losing its appeal, and her increasing deafness hampered the long conversations they had enjoyed in the past. After her legal separation from Charles Howard, however, the King’s apathy turned to open aversion. On one occasion he charged into the Queen’s room while Mrs Howard was arranging a piece of fabric around her mistress’s décolletage, and snatched it from her, crying: ‘Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you hide the Queen’s!’ According to Horace Walpole, this and similar incidents were repeated on numerous occasions.11

  Other courtiers began to notice that the King’s nightly visits to his mistress’s chambers were becoming much shorter than they had been, and sometimes there was a total intermission. The tension between the pair soon spilled out from their private apartments into the open court. All those who saw them together at the commerce table or other evening entertainment observed that they were ‘so ill together that, when he did not neglect her, the notice he took of her was still a stronger mark of his dislike than his taking none’. At Richmond Lodge, where the walls were thin enough for private conversations to be overheard, Lady Bristol, a Lady of the Bedchamber whose apartment adjoined Henrietta’s, reported that she often heard the King speaking to his mistress in an ‘angry and impatient tone’. One evening (her ear no doubt pressed close to the wall), she could discern Mrs Howard’s subdued tones for a long time, as she tried to persuade him about some political matter. At length, Lady Bristol heard him exclaim: ‘That is none of your business, madam; you have nothing to do with that.’12

  Her husband’s obvious irritation with his mistress was no doubt a source of satisfaction to Caroline, who had always been jealous of her rival. Yet she still refused to release Henrietta from service, for the danger that George might find a more attractive replacement was even greater now that she herself had started to lose her sexual appeal for him. Bearing ten children had taken its toll on her figure, and her fondness for chocolate had further increased its rotundity. In fact, she had grown so fat that she struggled to keep up with the King on their customary long walks in the gardens at Kensington, and by the time they returned, her ladies noticed that she was always red in the face and sweating profusely. She often had to plunge her gouty legs into icy-cold water before these excursions so that she was able to set out at all.

  A more worrying complaint that had been festering for some years was also now causing her real discomfort. During the birth of her last child, Louisa, in 1724, she had developed an umbilical hernia. Knowing that the King could not tolerate any sign of physical infirmity or illness, she had taken great care to hide this complaint from him, and nobody knew of it but her German nurse and her most trusted Lady of the Bedchamber, Mrs Clayton, who had discovered it by accident. ‘To prevent all suspicion her Majesty would frequently stand for some minutes in her shift talking to her Ladies,’ recounted Horace Walpole, ‘tho labouring with so dangerous a complaint.’13

  In May 1729, tired and frustrated with his bloated wife and ageing mistress, George II sought refuge in the one place on earth he desired to be more than any other: Hanover. He had long cherished a desire to return to the country he had not seen since his father’s accession some fifteen years earlier, and this had intensified after he himself had become King and abandoned any pretence of loving England. The people were now as irksome to him as they had been to his father, and he found fault in everything they did – from their manners and customs to the very fabric of their political constitution. He even insisted that his cooks learn how to prepare traditional German dishes, and became so fond of ‘Rhenish soup’ that it was hardly ever off the menu.14 All this generated a great deal of bad feeling among his English subjects, who needed little excuse to revert to their accustomed xenophobia.

  George cared little for their resentment, however, and began to establish a regular pattern of visits to his homeland. Whilst he enjoyed these immensely, his courtiers there were subjected to the same monotony of routine that their counterparts in London suffered on a daily basis. ‘Our life is as uniform as that of a monastery,’ complained one of his English retinue at Herrenhausen. ‘Every morning at eleven and every evening at six we drive in the heat to Herrenhausen through an enormous linden avenue; and twice a day cover our coats and coaches with dust. In the King’s society there is never the least change. At table, and at cards, he sees always the same faces, and at the end of the game retires into his chamber. Twice a week there is a French theatre; the other days there is a play in the gallery. In this way, were the King always to stop in Hanover, one could take a ten years’ calendar of his proceedings, and settle beforehand what his time of business, meals, and pleasure would be.’15

  When her royal master was away in Hanover, Henrietta was at least free from his bouts of temper and hostility towards her. But she was still left serving a spiteful and vindictive mistress, and the tedium of court life was only slightly alleviated by the King’s absence. Frustration, melancholy and do
wnright boredom soon took their toll on her health. In July 1730, she fell ill with a ‘severe fitt of Collick’. The Queen refused to excuse her from her duties, however, and she complained to Gay: ‘I am now in close waiting, my spirits very low, and my understanding very weak.’16 She had barely recovered from this when in October she was struck down by a fever. This time Caroline was forced to relent, and Henrietta kept to her bed for several days ‘in extreme pain’.17 It took her some months to get over this, and it was only at the end of the year that her friend the Duchess of Queensberry was able – with some relief – to speak of her recovery. ‘I am . . . very very glad that you are better & think of life,’ she wrote, ‘for I know none who one could more wish to have live than yourself.’18 Although Henrietta weathered this particular attack, she continued to be plagued by ill health throughout the years that followed.

  But in 1731, her luck suddenly changed. Relief came from a wholly unexpected quarter. So many times in the past, her husband had tormented her when she was at her lowest ebb, but this time he was the cause (albeit inadvertently) of great joy. On 22 June, his brother Edward died and he succeeded as 9th Earl of Suffolk. By the terms of their separation, Henrietta was entitled to style herself Countess if her husband inherited the family title and estate. What was more, the late Earl had defied convention (or more precisely his brother, whom he despised) by bequeathing all that remained of his fortune to his long-suffering sister-in-law. Thanks to his protracted legal wranglings with Charles, this had dwindled to some two or three thousand pounds, but to Henrietta it was still a considerable sum.

  Her new title, though, meant more to her than any amount of money. She had at last won some recompense from the husband who had subjected her to years of misery and hardship. As Countess of Suffolk, she was unlikely ever again to return to that wretched state, for with such a prestigious title came the potential for influence and money. This had a profound effect upon her position at court. A countess could not hold such a lowly position as Woman of the Bedchamber. The Queen would therefore either have to release her from service altogether, or promote her. If she chose the latter, the options were limited. The rank immediately above Henrietta’s former one – that of Lady of the Bedchamber – was a possibility, but her new status entitled her to aim even higher. Indeed, the most prestigious position in the Queen’s household was now open to her: that of Mistress of the Robes.

  Henrietta now faced the prospect of a substantial promotion if she stayed at court, or the freedom and independence for which she had so long fought if she was allowed to quit it. It was a prospect at once delightful to the mistress and galling to the Queen, who for years had derived petty satisfaction from subjecting her rival to menial tasks. For her part, the new Countess of Suffolk no doubt preferred the option of escaping court altogether and settling at her beloved Marble Hill, but her mistress still had an eye to the delicate balance of power that she had so long maintained at court, and was not about to let a mere title disrupt it. She therefore gave Henrietta the choice of becoming a Lady of the Bedchamber or Mistress of the Robes. The latter post was then occupied by the Duchess of Dorset, but Caroline was still obliged to offer it to Henrietta.

  Henrietta of course chose the more prestigious position. It was hardly a difficult decision, and she confessed to a friend that she ‘did not take one moment to consider of it’. She ‘kissed hands’ for the post on 29 June, and the following day an official letter of appointment was drawn up. Queen Caroline’s ‘Right Trusty and Welbeloved Cousin’, the Countess of Suffolk, was henceforth the most senior member of her household.19

  Henrietta’s new position came with a salary of £400 a year and a substantially reduced set of duties. No longer would she be required to undertake such menial tasks as spending hours on bended knee holding a heavy ornamental wash basin while the royal person was cleansed by her ladies. In fact, she was no longer concerned with any of the Queen’s more personal requirements, for her responsibilities were now confined to the rather more pleasant task of overseeing the royal wardrobe. Even then, the majority of the work was carried out by the Ladies of the Bedchamber, who commissioned new garments and ensured that everything was in place for the daily ceremony of dressing. Lady Suffolk might also be required to attend formal state events such as the reception of ambassadors, or the lavish dinners and assemblies that were periodically held at court to celebrate royal birthdays, the anniversary of the coronation, or other notable events. But these were hardly burdensome duties, and the post was a sinecure compared to that which she had formerly held. Gone were the days of having to be always on hand to answer the Queen’s slightest whim. Indeed, regular attendance at court was not a requirement for the Mistress of the Robes.

  ‘Every thing as yet promises more happiness for the latter part of my life then I have yet had a prospect off,’ Henrietta wrote expansively to Gay. ‘I shall now often visit Marble-Hill my time is become very much my own; and I shall see it without dread of being oblig’d to sell it to answer the engagements I had put myself under to avoid a greater evil.’20 The ‘engagements’ that she referred to were the financial provisions that she had made for her husband as part of their legal separation. The £1,200 she had agreed to pay him each year had only been for as long as his brother lived, so it had now ceased. Free from this heavy financial burden, as well as from practically all her onerous duties at court, Henrietta had just cause for celebration.

  Her friends rejoiced at her sudden change of fortune. ‘Your Letter was not ill-bestow’d,’ wrote Gay, ‘for I found in it such an air of satisfaction that I have a pleasure every time I think of it.’ He and the other members of her circle gently teased her by adopting a formal style to their correspondence and insisting upon calling her ‘Your Ladyship’. Dr Arbuthnot led the charge. ‘I have the honour to congratulate your ladyship on your late honour and preferment’, he wrote, ‘and the obliging manner that I hear the last was conferred.’ Lady Hervey went one step further by calling her friend ‘dear Swiss Countess’.21 Henrietta pleaded with them to revert to their former way of addressing her, but she was nevertheless proud of her new title, and henceforth signed her letters ‘H. Suffolk’.

  Only Swift, who still harboured a bitter resentment against her, sounded a false note on the occasion. Although he had not written to her for years, he could not resist doing so now. ‘I give you joy of your new title,’ he sneered, before warning of ‘the consequences it may have, or hath had, on your rising at court’. He went on to remind her that he had prophesied in his ‘Character’ that if she ever became a great lady, the impact upon her attitudes and behaviour would inevitably be a negative one.22 But nothing could dampen Henrietta’s spirits – not even the fresh trouble that was brewing with her husband.

  Although he had inherited all the titles and estates that were due to him, Charles had been incensed by his late brother’s deliberate slight in leaving his money to Henrietta. Fury combined with greed, as well as his customary readiness to torment his wife, and he immediately contested the will. ‘I am persuaided it will be try’d to the utmost,’ Henrietta told Gay, but added: ‘poor Lord Suffolk took so much care in the will he made, that the best lawyers say’s it must stand good’. Her friend’s reply was sympathetic. ‘I dont like Lawsuits,’ he wrote. ‘I wish you could have your right without ’em.’ But he evidently perceived that she was not overly troubled by her husband’s actions, for he concluded: ‘As you descend from Lawyers, what might be my plague perhaps may be only your amusement.’ Charles was so intent upon overthrowing the will, however, that he poured all his energies into the task, even disregarding the arrangement of his brother’s funeral in the process. ‘Mr Howard took possession of Body and goods,’ his wife reported in early July, ‘and was not prevail’d upon till yesterday, to resign the former for Burrial.’23

  The new Earl of Suffolk would doggedly pursue his battle against the will for the next two years, even though the last thing he needed was to run up substantial legal costs. While he enjo
yed undisputed possession of the Audley End estate, it was heavily burdened with debt. There was already a mortgage of £5,000 (with accumulated interest) on the house and lands, which dated back to the time of the 6th Earl. His successor, meanwhile, had run up debts amounting to more than £8,000. Charles was continually being pressed for payment of these, to say nothing of his own obligations (which were now considerable), and he was eventually forced to seek an act empowering him to raise money by sale or mortgage so that he could settle them. His inheritance had therefore brought him nothing but worry, vexation and trouble. His wife, by contrast, could enjoy all the benefits of her new title without being associated with any of the Earl’s debts: her carefully worded deed of separation had made sure of that. Revenge had been a long time coming, but it was all the sweeter for it.

  The promotion of George II’s mistress to her new title and position attracted a great deal of interest in both the press and the court. It was reported in all the major newspapers, from The Craftsman to The Gentleman’s Magazine. At court, meanwhile, the chief speculation was who would succeed Lady Suffolk as Woman of the Bedchamber. ‘I hear no one but Mrs Claverin named for Mrs Howard’s place,’ wrote the Countess of Pembroke to Charlotte Clayton, who, as Henrietta’s long-standing rival in the Queen’s household, was galled by her promotion. The Countess tried to console her friend by adding that Henrietta’s new position did not seem to have brought her much joy. ‘She has come in the Queen’s train to the drawing-room . . . and has appeared with the most melancholy face that was possible.’24

  Any anxiety Henrietta may have had that the Queen would disregard her new position and continue to inflict menial tasks upon her was dispelled on her very first day as Mistress of the Robes. She offered to dress her mistress’s head as before, but Caroline insisted that protocol should be followed and therefore gave this task to a lower-ranking servant. Lady Suffolk was obliged to do nothing more taxing than present her jewels. The Queen remained as good as her word, and in return Henrietta was assiduous in carrying out her new duties. These were much better suited to her, for she had always had a natural sense of style and did her best to improve that of her mistress. Her correspondence shows that she went to great lengths to procure luxury fabrics and adornments for the royal wardrobe, even sending specific requests to any of her acquaintances who were travelling abroad. The Earl of Essex, a former Gentleman of the Bedchamber and now the King’s ambassador in Sardinia, was particularly helpful in this respect. At Henrietta’s request, he purchased everything from fine Italian leather for the Queen’s gloves to lavish gold fabric for her dresses.25