A NEW FAVOURITE AND A SETTLEMENT.
The King and Queen in the jubilation of their victory over the Prince
of Wales had a mind to celebrate it by turning him and his young wife
out of St. James’s Palace, but they were dissuaded from this benevolent
intention by the judicious Sir Robert Walpole. Instead the Prince
retained his position--though no doubt he would have much preferred a
house of his own--but the state of affairs under these circumstances
must have reached the limit of painfulness to the young Princess and
her husband.
Each night “he led the Queen by the hand to dinner,” says Doran, “and
she could have stabbed him on the way; for her wrath was more bitter
than ever against him, for the reason that he had introduced her name,
through his friends, in the Parliamentary debate.”
This referred presumably to his mention of the fact that he had told
his mother of his embarrassments.
The Prince still attended his father’s levees occasionally, but the
King never acknowledged his presence in any way whatever. Very soon,
however, at the conclusion of the session of Parliament, the Court
moved to Richmond, and there the little King, now quite restored to
health, distinguished this year 1737 by another gracious act; he took
still another mistress. This time the object of his Royal selection was
the children’s governess, Lady Deloraine.
The lady in question was Mary Howard--the King seemed to favour the
name of Howard in his amours--of the Suffolk family, who had married
Henry Scott, first Earl of Deloraine; but at this period he was dead
and she had remarried William Wyndham, Esq., of Cassham.
She was an extremely pretty woman, but celebrated for the looseness of
her talk in that age of looseness. She was not a woman of much brain
power, and a fair estimate of her character may be formed from the
following incident.
Sir Robert Walpole came across her one day in the Hall at Richmond
while she was dangling her little boy of about twelve months in her
arms, and made the following characteristic remark--“That’s a very
pretty boy, Lady Deloraine, whose is it?” Her ladyship, nothing
abashed, took the enquiry in the spirit in which it was offered, and
replied before a group of people--“Mr. Wyndham’s, upon honour;” and
then laughingly continued, “but I will not promise whose the next shall
be!”
Continuing the discourse later in private with Sir Robert Walpole, she
pretended that she had not yet yielded to the King’s importunities,
and remarked that “she was not of an age to act like a vain or a
loving fool, but if she did consent she would be well paid.” She added
naively to Sir Robert--who himself had a mistress, the well known Miss
Skerrett, whom he adored and afterwards married--“nothing but interest
should bribe her; for as to love she had enough of that, as well as
a younger man at home; and that she thought old men and Kings ought
always to be made to pay well!” Her empty head and want of morals led
her to boast freely at this time; she confided in the well known Lady
Sundon, with whom she had a very slight acquaintance, that the King
had been very importunate these two years, and had often told her how
unkind she was to refuse him, that it was mere crossness, for that he
was sure her husband (Mr. Wyndham, who was sub-governor to the Duke of
Cumberland) would not take it at all ill.
She made a similar communication to Lord Hervey, abruptly one day at
Richmond, at this time before a room full of people: “Do you know the
King has been in love with me these two years?” she queried.
At which Lord Hervey, rather taken aback, answered, to turn the
conversation, “Who is not in love with you?”
He himself certainly was not, for this is how he sums her up in his
Memoirs:
“Her Ladyship was one of the vainest as well as one of the simplest
women that ever lived; but to this wretched head there was certainly
joined one of the prettiest faces that ever was formed, which, though
she was now five and thirty,[43] had a bloom upon it too, that not
one woman in ten thousand has at fifteen.” This was Horace Walpole’s
opinion of Lady Deloraine: “A pretty idiot, with most of the vices of
her own sex, and the additional one of ours--drinking.
“Yet this thing of convenience on the arrival of Lady Yarmouth, Madame
Walmoden, put on all that dignity of passion, which even revolts real
inclination.”
Lady Deloraine, however, went on her way rejoicing at this time, and as
the summer wore on and the King showed no signs of returning to Hanover
and Madame de Walmoden, openly boasted that she was keeping him in
England.
She did not, however, appear to derive much substantial profit from her
position, as the following incident, related by Sir Robert Walpole to
the Queen, will show; neither had the King forgotten Madame de Walmoden.
George had ordered Walpole one day to buy one hundred lottery tickets,
and to charge the amount, £1,000, to the Secret Service Fund, an
atrocious robbery of the public!
Walpole, having carried out his commission without a murmur, confided
the transaction to Lord Hervey, mentioning that it was for the King’s
favourite.
Hervey, thinking he meant Lady Deloraine, commented: “I did not think
he went so deep there,” referring to the amount.
“No,” Walpole corrected, “I mean the Hanover woman. You are right to
imagine that he does not go so deep to his lying fool here. He will
give her a couple of the tickets and think her generously used.”
By which it seems that the King’s German women had by far the better
knack of getting money out of him than the English favourites.
But Walpole’s sagacity had, just previous to this, at the end of the
Parliamentary Session, brought the question of the Prince of Wales’s
income adroitly into something of a settlement. He had with the
greatest difficulty induced the King and Queen to agree to a settlement
of the £50,000 a year mentioned in the King’s celebrated message to
the Prince, and the difficulty of the other £50,000 a year claimed by
Frederick was got over by Parliament being persuaded to settle an extra
large jointure on the Princess of Wales, £50,000 a year in fact. So the
parsimonious little King got out of paying it after all.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] She was thirty-seven at this time, having been born in 1700.