Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (24 page)

In 1734, an uneasy love triangle existed at Kensington Palace. George II, the former Prince George Augustus, was by now well established as Britain’s king, and Caroline as his queen. For nearly twenty years now Henrietta Howard had soldiered on in the unglamorous, unenviable and unpaid job of George II’s acknowledged lover. She felt she’d seen quite enough of court life and yearned to escape.

The king, tired of his mistress, would have let her go. But Henrietta was a valuable servant to Caroline, and the queen wanted her to stay. This placed all three in an extraordinary dilemma.

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The situation was most pressing, and most distressing, to Henrietta. She lived right at the very heart of the Georgian court. ‘There is no politician who more carefully watches the motions and dispositions of things and persons,’ people said, and she was legendary for her ‘imperceptible dexterity’ in negotiating court life.
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Yet Henrietta’s way of life was gradually taking its toll upon both her health and her happiness. Like all the courtiers, her daily struggle for survival at court meant that she was becoming a slave to deception. 

Jonathan Swift, the outsider, was perceptive enough to notice the danger. He warned that Henrietta might ‘come in time to believe herself’ as she dealt out the courtier’s habitual half-truths and flattery. If this happened, it could have ‘terrible consequences’ for her.

In a particularly striking simile, Swift feared that Henrietta’s talents as a courtier would ‘spread, enlarge, and multiply to such a
degree, that her private virtues for want of room and time to operate, must be folded and laid up clean like clothes in a chest’. All that was best about Henrietta’s character would remain hidden away until ‘some reverse of fortune’ should ‘dispose her to retirement’.
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Henrietta hoped to escape from court while her integrity still remained intact and to put back on the ‘clothes’ of sincerity, wisdom and love that were so alien to a courtier’s role.

But the story of her difficult life so far suggested that this might be impossible.

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Henrietta was born into the Hobart family of Norfolk. She’d been baptised in London on 11 May 1689, but her family’s main home was Blickling Hall near Norwich.
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Despite the grandeur of their country mansion, the Hobarts’ finances were precarious, and became even more so after Henrietta’s father was killed in a duel in 1698. Left orphaned by the death of her mother shortly afterwards, Henrietta at the age of sixteen assumed that marriage to the thirty-year-old Charles Howard would provide her with some measure of security.

She made the terrible mistake of marrying him in 1706. In time Henrietta would deeply regret placing her confidence in this ‘wrong-headed, ill-tempered, obstinate, drunken, extravagant, brutal’ reprobate.
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As one of her friends put it, ‘thus they loved, thus they married, and thus they hated each other for the rest of their lives’.
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The couple were genteel paupers, their shortage of money made all the more excruciating by the need they felt to hide it. Charles spent his early married life in London in gaming houses and brothels, while their lack of cash meant that Henrietta often felt the ‘smart of hunger’. ‘Despised and abused’ by her husband, she would later recall that during her young adulthood she ‘suffer’d all that poverty and ye whole train of miseries that attend it can suggest to any one’s imagination’.
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Her plan to travel to Hanover to look for work and escape a
wretched life was spurred on by the birth of her son, Henry, in 1707. She and her husband could hardly afford the journey. Their expenses were met by Henrietta selling even their ‘beds & bedding’, and she was offered eighteen guineas by a periwig-maker for her lovely long light brown hair. Her disagreeable husband’s only reaction was to say he thought it worth not nearly so much.
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Once in Hanover, Henrietta did indeed find gainful employment: as a Bedchamber Woman to Princess Caroline and, soon after that, as a mistress to Prince George Augustus. The arrangement seemed acceptable, almost respectable, to everybody.

It would indeed have been more scandalous for the prince to have remained faithful to his wife. Lord Chesterfield recommended that every gentleman should take a mistress as an important part of his education. In preference to learning ‘all Plato and Aristotle by heart’, he advised a youth to fall ‘passionately in love with some determined coquette’ who would ‘lead you a dance, fashion, supple, and polish you’.
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For Henrietta’s part, ‘the sacrifice she made of her virtue’ was for reasons more pragmatic than romantic: ‘she had felt poverty, and was far from disliking power’.
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Princess Caroline, the wronged wife, was not too put out either. Writing to Caroline from Paris, the Duchess of Orléans was warm in her recommendation of separate sleeping arrangements for a royal husband and wife. ‘It is nothing new for a husband to have a mistress,’ she claimed, and ‘you won’t find one in ten thousand who loves no one but his wife. They deserve praise if they simply live on good terms with their wives and treat them kindly.’
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Double standards, though, were firmly in place where women’s sexual activities were concerned.
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Legal opinion had it that a man’s wife was his possession just like his money, and for another man to sleep with her was ‘the highest invasion of property’.
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Men, then, would not put up with the infidelities that their wives had to tolerate: ‘forgiveness on the part of a wife’ was ‘meritorious; while a similar forgiveness on the part of the husband would be degrading and dishonourable’.
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After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Henrietta Howard –
both servant and mistress – accompanied the new royal family on its journey to England. She was retained as part of Princess Caroline’s British household, earning
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300 a year as one of the six Bedchamber Women, and her husband was made a Groom of the Bedchamber to George I. The couple initially shared an apartment at St James’s Palace, but their attachment to different households would prove problematic when war broke out between the rival courts.
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During these years, Henrietta found herself becoming friends with the sprightly literary spirits of the age: John Gay, Alexander Pope, Dr Arbuthnot and Jonathan Swift. 

By then, Henrietta’s husband had become a terrible burden to her. He took her money, and she was often in physical danger from his alcohol-fuelled violence. After she’d left him, Henrietta addressed to Charles Howard a list of the abuses she’d endured at his hands: ‘you have call’d me names and have threatened to kick me and to break my neck. I have often laid abed with you when I have been under apprehensions of your doing me a mischief and sometimes I have got out of bed for fear you shou’d.’
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While everybody else seemed to tolerate her role as the Prince of Wales’s mistress, her husband sought to benefit from it, pretending to be jealous and demanding to be compensated financially for his supposed shame.

Henrietta’s plight was pitiable. While her husband lorded it over her ‘with tyranny; with cruelty, [her] life in danger’, she had no remedy in the eyes of the law. Society treated women abominably, Henrietta thought privately. ‘If they have superior sense, superior fortitude and reason, then why a slave to what’s inferior to them?’ she asked. Her own husband was indeed ‘inferior to all mankind’, and Henrietta reasoned with herself that his neglect, alternating with brutality, negated their marriage contract: ‘I must believe I am free.’
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Yet she recognised that the world would not agree. Only the exceptional voices of her time, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s, publicly exposed the unfairness of an unfaithful wife being universally condemned while a husband’s adultery was overlooked:

Henrietta’s only comfort lay in her female friends and, when they were absent, their letters. Lady Lansdowne was typical in writing: ‘Dear Mrs Howard, you & I shall live to see better days, & love & honour to flourish once more.’
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Despite the difficulties she had with her husband, Henrietta was remarkably well-suited to the job of royal mistress. She was never arrogant or indiscreet. Polite to everybody, she became known as ‘The Swiss’ because of her neutrality in court storms. If Henrietta were a book, wrote her friend Molly Hervey, she would be ‘a complete treatise on subjects moral, instructive, and entertaining, perfectly well digested & connected, the style is admirable, the reasoning clear & strong’.
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There were a few people at court who disliked Henrietta, but they condemned her in the mildest of terms. ‘The real truth is, that Mrs Howard was more remarkable for beauty than for understanding,’ concluded an early biographer of Sir Robert Walpole, and he said that her becoming royal mistress was just a matter of convenience.

Henrietta was not even the first choice, he claimed, as Prince George Augustus had previously been ‘enamoured’ of the spirited Mary Bellenden. She’d boldly turned him down and allowed her friend Henrietta to pick him up instead.
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And Henrietta did not find the mistress’s role at all delightful, even in the tender years of her relationship with Prince George Augustus before he became king. ‘I was told’, wrote Mary Bellenden to Henrietta as early as April 1722, ‘that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & cross & not so good to you as usual.’
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There was certainly a greater frankness and affection between Henrietta and Mary than between either of them and their so-called lover.

The goings-on at George II’s court are often described in almost cosy terms, as if the king could legitimately sleep with any
number of jolly playfellows, and certainly there were plenty of women willing to taste ‘the charms/ of love and life in a young monarch’s arms’.
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This was tolerated partly because George II made sure that his mistresses were perceived to be powerless – a sharp contrast to the despicable potent German wiles wielded by Melusine in the previous generation. ‘He had seen, and lamented, that his father had been governed by his mistresses,’ people said, and was therefore ‘extremely cautious to avoid a similar error’.
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Caroline likewise treated ‘those little episodes’ of her husband’s with indifference for the most part, and with some contempt. She knew that in reality George II ‘reserved his heart, and his friendship’ for her alone.
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Sir Robert Walpole also claimed to perceive the real situation behind the royal marriage. In an arresting image, he said that those who cultivated Henrietta at the expense of the queen had the ‘wrong sow by the ear’.
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Through the pens of her friends, Henrietta is shown to be a thoughtful, witty, warm and reasonable woman, far too intelligent to be satisfied as a member of the royal circus, where handing glasses at table and doing up dresses formed her chief duties. Mary Bellenden, who had resigned as a Maid of Honour upon a marriage made for love, wrote to her friend that ‘it wou’d make one half mad’ to think of the time they had both misspent in servitude.

‘I am happy’, she continued, ‘& I wou’d to God you were so. I wish … that you might leave that life of hurry, & be able to enjoy those that love you, & be a little at rest.’
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By 1734, after nearly two decades as the king’s mistress, Henrietta herself was almost desperate to retire. George II and Caroline had been king and queen for nearly seven years, and this had been the busiest, most exciting and most successful period of their lives so far.

In the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, there was a rumour that George II was planning to rescue his much-maligned mother’s reputation, bringing her portrait out of storage and
hanging it on the wall.
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But another undercurrent of gossip rivalled it: that now, as king, with full access to the archives at Hanover, he’d discovered some of the letters written by his mother to her lover. These had shocked him, convinced him of her guilt and killed the affection in his memory of her.
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The new king remained touchy on the subject and sought to destroy his mother’s papers. In 1732, he used the diplomatic service to suppress an anonymous and scurrilous work about her called the
Histoire secrète de la duchesse d’Hanover
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The king discussed almost – but not quite – everything with John Hervey, now Vice-Chamberlain of the court. While he would freely dissect his difficult relationship with his father, he never mentioned his mother at all.
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Only one thing is sure: the death of the disgraced mother he had not seen for so long, followed so soon by the demise of his hated father, must have caused a strange mixture of reactions. ‘I am at a loss’, he admitted, ‘how to express myself upon this great and melancholy occasion.’
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