Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  Statements like that would certainly make Cumberland (and Henrietta, of course) seem deliciously guilty. That such embarrassingly graphic testimony might have unintended consequences never appeared to disconcert his lordship. The baron hadn’t seemed concerned with the very tangible possibility that the angry and humiliated Lady Grosvenor had plenty of ammunition with which to countersue him for adultery. For some reason he surmised that she would never do so.

  Cumberland assembled his own legal team, Buxton and Windus, as he waited for the proverbial other shoe—a crim. con. suit—to drop. The London miasma was made even thicker by the rumors that Lord Grosvenor’s real goal in seeking an annulment was to blackmail the crown into awarding him a dukedom.

  In the late spring of 1770 the baron filed his crim. con. suit, and in order to gin up sympathy, circulated copies of his wife’s purloined love letters. Unfortunately, Grosvenor’s own libertinism was so renowned, including his affinity for the most squalid whores he could procure, that it was a stretch for anyone to believe that he was the wronged party. Nonetheless, the content of the letters spoke for itself, duly compromising the authors’ reputations. After the baron sent the lovers’ correspondence to John Wheble, the publisher of the Middlesex Journal (which began to feature them in mid-June), John Bull had a field day over Cumberland’s maudlin and ungrammatical billets-doux. The crown was emphatically embarrassed.

  All of England was abuzz when the trial began in London during the first week of July. Sixty-five-year-old Lord Mansfield was charged with adjudicating the matter from the King’s Bench. Everyone wondered whether the “Chesire Cornuto,” as the cuckolded Grosvenor was dubbed, would receive his divorce. On July 5, the case of Grosvenor v. Cumberland commenced. The courtroom was packed to the rafters. However, the aggrieved parties were nowhere near the mob scene, because by law they were barred from being present at the trial. Instead, the lawyers for both sides did all the talking.

  As if to convey that the whole three-ring circus was no concern of his, King George was several miles from the City; he took his younger brother riding in Richmond Park on the opening day of the trial.

  Cumberland’s attorneys presented fewer witnesses than the baron’s representatives, but in the duke’s case, quality (or the deliberate lack thereof) trumped quantity. Testifying on Cumberland’s behalf (which really meant that they were trashing the baron’s character, rather than defending the duke’s) were the skankiest prostitutes in London, each of whom had a lurid anecdote to share with the court about procuring for, or directly pleasuring, Lord Grosvenor. It was all very entertaining, except that the baron’s character (objectionable as it was) wasn’t the focus of the trial.

  It was the aim of Grosvenor’s attorney, Lord Wedderburn, to embarrass the royal family by demanding an outrageous sum in damages. The usual figure awarded to a successful petitioner in a crim. con. suit was about £200. That figure in 1770 would be roughly equivalent to $36,500 today. On rare occasions British juries had awarded as much as £3,000 in damages (over $547,000 nowadays). Lord Wedderburn demanded £100,000—more than $18 million today.

  To demonstrate his client’s worthiness of such a magnanimous award, Wedderburn played to the gallery by reading aloud some of the lovers’ torrid correspondence. The barrister’s deadpan delivery illuminated His Royal Highness’s inadequate education, particularly when he was unable to suppress a supercilious chuckle as he read the duke’s mangled French.

  . . . aimons toujours mon adorable petite amour je vous adore plusque la vie même. [we (the “royal we”) love always my adorable little lover; I adore you more than life itself.]

  Cumberland’s pathetic description of his frustrated erotic dream aboard the Venus also provoked gales of laughter. According to the General Evening Post the recitation of the love letters exchanged between Henrietta and the duke “occasioned much entertainment to the whole court, as they may truly be said to add to the novelty of epistolary writing.” And this was an era when epistolary writing had been elevated to an art form!

  In his summation on behalf of the complainant, Lord Wedderburn argued that the way a prince should behave was as much at issue as the crim. con. charges. By granting the exorbitant sum of damages to his client, the jury would be sending a clear message to the Duke of Cumberland, deterring him “from setting a bad example to the subordinate classes of society” and encouraging him to heed the example of his older brother, the king, “whose conjugal attachments, abstracted from his other virtues, not only ornamented the throne he filled, but shed a bright example to his subjects in general.”

  In his client’s defense, Cumberland’s barrister, the morbidly obese John Dunning, reminded the jury that the duke and Lady Grosvenor were never actually apprehended in the act of making love. Witnesses (albeit those in the duke’s employ) had corroborated Dunning’s assertion that the affair was unconsummated. One such witness was Robert Giddings, Cumberland’s friend and gentleman porter. He testified to being in the lovers’ presence when they met near Eaton, but that all the couple did was “sit upon the grass . . . and that His Royal Highness read a play or some book to the said Lady Grosvenor.”

  Dunning then summoned his parade of tawdry witnesses against Lord Grosvenor.

  The judge, Lord Mansfield (who was known to generally rule for the crown), charged the jury to disregard the duke’s rank, and, when they deliberated over the amount of damages, to consider the case merely as “a question between A and B.” The jury entered a verdict of “guilty” but ignored Mansfield’s instructions regarding the amount of damages. They socked it to the duke to the tune of £10,000, plus an additional £3,000 in legal fees. Thirteen thousand pounds in 1770 is worth more than $2.3 million today. Although some people thought that Cumberland should have been hit harder, they conceded that the duke lived on a fixed income and didn’t have the money; consequently, any additional sums would have to come out of the royal treasury, punishing the taxpayer instead.

  The royal family perennially lived beyond its means. Cumberland was so broke that he sought to borrow the £13,000 in damages from his brother the king, further embarrassing the crown. Accompanied by Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester (George III’s favorite brother until his own sexcapade cost him the monarch’s goodwill), Cumberland approached George for the cash. But the king didn’t have £13,000 in ready money either. Hat in hand, the monarch sheepishly applied to the prime minister, Lord North, to intercede for the royal family in Parliament and to authorize the expenditure from the Civil List. Even worse, time was of the essence. On November 5, the mortified king wrote to North: A subject of a most private and delicate kind obliges me to lose no time in acquainting you that my two brothers have this day applied to me on the difficulty that the folly of the youngest has drawn him into; the affair is too public for you to doubt but that it regards the lawsuit; the time will expire for this time seven night when he must pay the damages and the other expenses attending it. He has taken no step to raise the money, and he has now applied to me as the only means by which he can obtain it; I therefore promised to write to you, though I saw great difficulty in your finding so large a sum as thirteen thousand pounds in so short a time; but . . . [he pointed out to me] that the prosecutor would eventually force the House, which would at this licentious time occasion disagreeable reflections on the rest of his family as well as on him.

  The king hastened to remind the PM, “Whatever can be done ought to be done,” and it went without saying, though George did so anyway, that “I ought as little as possible to appear in so very improper a business.” After Lord North managed to secure the funds through the treasurer, Le Grand, the sovereign assured Le Grand that he hadn’t taken the whole sordid business sitting down, writing, “I flatter myself that the truths I have thought it incumbent to utter may be of some use in his future conduct.”

  King George was ever the responsible big brother. But their sister, Princess Amelia, cut off all communication with Cumberland following the verdict, although he�
�d been her favorite sibling. Amelia had agreed with the jury. According to Lady Coke, “the little remorse he seem’d to have for having ruin’d a whole family quite shocked her, and the little feeling he had for himself, though abus’d and ridiculed in every public paper, considering his rank, shocked her to the last degree.”

  Britons waited breathlessly for the next step. Would Lord Grosvenor (who claimed that he would donate the damages money to charity) move forward with an adultery trial and ask Parliament to grant him a divorce?

  On July 28, 1770, the Middlesex Journal coyly reported that “a very Great Personage and his amiable Lady have expressed a wish to L[ord] G[rosvenor] that he not sue for divorce, fearing that an alliance by no means to be wished would be the consequence.” That possible “consequence”—a marriage between Lady Grosvenor and her royal lover—would have been disastrous, creating even more humiliation for the crown. The former Henrietta Vernon would never have made an appropriate wife for a prince of the blood; and their marriage would have kept the House of Hanover from being able to cement another vital dynastic and political alliance by uniting Cumberland with some foreign princess.

  The case of Grosvenor v. Cumberland continued to fuel the excitement of the press. One pamphleteer referred to the matter as “the most important and remarkable trial ever to come before a court of jurisdiction.” And another anonymous author expressed the more or less middleclass opinion that royal princes should be held to the same moral standards as the king (and George III was nothing else if not a prig). A royal’s conduct was “a matter of national as well as private concern, such a dangerous influence do they derive from their titular and elevated station.” The consensus among members of the press was that Cumberland’s behavior had disgraced the crown and, by extension, England herself.

  A satirical ditty was published anonymously, unfavorably comparing the lecherous duke to his uncle—the previous Duke of Cumberland, who had routed Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden.

  THE ADULTERER, A POEM

  See, how dishonouring his Noble Race

  Thy nephew earns reproaches and disgrace

  Whilst a vile deed of rapine and fraud

  Shall spread his Name with Infamy abroad

  And foreign nations shall this land abuse

  —For who shall dare th’atrocious act excuse?

  After the verdict was rendered Lord Grosvenor left for Newmarket, where he shamelessly appeared in public with his latest doxy on his arm. Suprisingly, Lady Grosvenor was the only party who more or less escaped whipping. In fact, she was more pitied than censured. She swiftly became the heroine of a trio of sentimental novels, viewed as the victim of a loveless marriage, a situation that many eighteenth-century women could easily relate to. The titles, including The Fair Adulteress and The Innocent Adulteress, did not conceal Henrietta’s guilt, but nonetheless found her blameless.

  By the autumn of 1770 Lady Grosvenor had spent six months in rented lodgings and was running out of funds to sustain herself and her small household staff. The cruelest twist of all was that her handsome prince was not about to ride to her financial rescue. Cumberland soon revealed himself to be the slimiest of frogs. When the going got tough for his lover, and Henrietta wondered how she’d survive the coming winter, he dumped her. They never again crossed paths.

  Come Christmas, Cumberland was dashing about town with his newest inamorata, a courtesan known as Mrs. Hailey. King George, who must have thought that things couldn’t get worse after his brother had accepted treasury funds to pay Lord Grosvenor’s legal damages, was utterly mortified by the duke’s shameful conduct.

  Nothing says revenge like a neglected wife and jilted lover. Once Henrietta realized that she would never wear the ermine mantle of a duchess, she decided to contest the lawsuit that her husband had filed in the consistory court in Doctors Commons—an action that Grosvenor had fully assumed she would not take—countersuing him for libel. Because her liaison with the duke was over, her ladyship didn’t need a divorce anymore; she required economic freedom, which was exactly the sort of ruling the consistory court could give. If she won her countersuit, the Grosvenors would be formally separated, though not legally divorced, and Henrietta hoped for a big payday.

  Her case was an easy one to make, abetted by a sorority from a distant quarter; the creepiest prostitutes imaginable came crawling out of the woodwork to cheerfully testify that Grosvenor was a regular client. On April 22, 1771, Doctors Commons began deliberations, and soon reached its verdict: Although Lord Grosvenor had demonstrated proof of his wife’s infidelity, he himself had been shown to have “. . . led, and doth continue to lead, a vicious, lewd, and debauched life and conversation, by visiting, corresponding with, and carnally knowing, diverse strange women of loose character.”

  The court vindicated Lady Grosvenor by awarding her £1,200 a year (more than $206,000 today), to be paid by her husband. It was a victory, but not a triumph. Henrietta remained ostracized from society and was compelled to watch her purse to make ends meet. But one presumes she eventually found at least a modicum of happiness when she hooked up with a younger man, Lt. Gen. George Porter, an MP for Stockbridge.

  Lord Grosvenor was created 1st Earl Grosvenor in July 1784, and died on August 5, 1802, leaving Henrietta a widow. On September 1, she married Porter, who in 1819 inherited the Hungarian title of Baron de Hochepied. They both died in 1828, within three months of each other.

  The Duke of Cumberland remained estranged from the king until November 3, 1771, when he arrived, uninvited, at Richmond Lodge. The thirty-three-year-old monarch undoubtedly wondered why his brother had suddenly reappeared. The men exchanged banal pleasantries, perhaps discussing the weather and everyone’s general health. And then the twenty-six-year-old duke took a letter from his pocket and wordlessly thrust it into the king’s hands.

  As he read it, King George grew more livid with every clause. A torrid affair that became the talk of the nation was nothing compared to what Cumberland had gone and done this time: Sir, [the note began] It is impossible for me to describe the emotions whilst I impart an event which I feel I never should have kept a moment secret from you if I had not found myself incapable of offering you the cruel alternative of either being involved in any inconvenience by giving your consent to it; or of pronouncing my future misery for life by your refusal. Sir, I am married to Mrs. Horton Lord Ihrnam’s daughter and nothing now remains to make me one of the happiest of men but your approbation which I trust the sensibility of your heart and the amiable qualifications of the object of my choice will strongly plead for and fully justify.

  ~Your most

  anxious and

  dutiful brother

  The statuesque and voluptuous Anne Horton, Cumberland’s clandestine bride, had a slightly checkered past. Her father was a notorious rake, although that was often a badge of honor in the eighteenth century. She had been married previously, wedding Christopher Horton on August 4, 1765 (he died four years later), and was something of a flirt herself. Horace Walpole described her to Horace Mann as a “coquette beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely mistress of all her passions and projects.” According to a contemporary, Anne had the most amorous eyes in the world, with long, luscious lashes.

  Anne’s brother was well-known—and not liked—in England, which made the duke’s marriage an even stickier situation. He was Henry Lawes Luttrell, the candidate for Middlesex MP, shoehorned into Parliament against the wishes of the voters, who had preferred the firebrand John Wilkes. But Wilkes had been barred from taking his seat in the Commons because he was an outlaw, having been convicted of seditious libel.

  Although it would have been proper for Cumberland to have asked the king’s permission before he so rashly wed a commoner (and such a controversial one at that), there was at the time no law preventing the duke from doing so. And because he was twenty-six years old, Cumberland didn’t require his mother’s consent or that of the head of the family—King George. Henry had delibe
rately presented his older brother with a fait accompli because he knew full well that George would never have given the marriage his blessing. To have done so would have been tantamount to tossing away one of his international bargaining chips, and he had only a finite number of siblings to unite with members of the continental royal houses.

  George keenly felt that Cumberland had shown zero sense of duty and had betrayed family, crown, and country by wedding Mrs. Horton. The king himself had once been madly in love with a commoner, Lady Sarah Lennox, but duty had compelled him to marry a German princess, the better to cement England’s political alliances. If he had willingly sacrificed his happiness to the exigencies of obligation, so indeed should the rest of the royal family.

  George III’s specific reaction to the contents of Cumberland’s letter has been preserved.

  After walking some minutes in silence to smother my feelings, I without passion spoke to him to the following effect, that I could not believe he had taken the step declared in the paper, to which he answered that he would never tell me an untruth.

  In a letter to their mother, the king confided, The more I reflect on his conduct, the more I see it as his inevitable ruin and as a disgrace to the whole family.

  And George expressed his private feelings in a letter to another of his younger brothers, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester—who was in Florence recuperating from an illness. Unbeknownst to King George, Gloucester had also contracted a clandestine marriage with a commoner, Maria Walpole, Countess Waldegrave.

  It is grievous to me to be obliged to acquaint you with an event that as it disgraces the family must cause you pain. The D [uke] of C[umberland], not content with his unwarrantable conduct in the St. Albans business, his attendance on Mrs. Hailey, and his connection with Fetty Place and Newmarket grooms, has now stooped to marry Mrs. Horton, Lord Ihrnam’s daughter. . . . In any country a Prince marrying a subject is looked upon as dishonourable, nay in Germany the children of such a marriage cannot succeed to any territories. But here where the crown is but too little respected it must be big with the greatest mischiefs. . . . It is impossible I can ever receive her or ever look on him again unless he will promise not publicly to acknowledge [his marriage] . . . the story has been too industriously spread by her family for anyone to doubt the truth; but if he does not avow, her people will by degrees grow doubtful, and I can without disgrace see him. . . . His retiring out of the kingdom is the only decent thing he has done. I could not write but I have sent Deaken [Colonel Deaken was George’s emissary] with my firm resolution of never seeing him again unless he consents to let this affair remain doubtful and that he never names the subject to his mother or me.