A PROFLIGATE PRINCE
Of the sons of the profligate Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry
Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, was, by universal consent, the most
abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of "revered memory," in
spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious.
Each brother had his amours--many of them highly discreditable; but for
unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the
unenviable palm.
Even the verdict of posterity is unable to credit this Princeling with a
solitary virtue, unless a handsome face and a passion for music can be
placed to his credit. In his career of female conquest, which began as
soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother's apron strings, he
left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which
was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor,
whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her
aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too pliant womanhood.
And yet, when his passion was in full flame, no woman was ever wooed
with apparently more sincere ardour and devotion.
"My dear Angel," he once wrote to her, "I got to bed
about ten. I then prayed for you, my dearest love, kissed
your dearest little hair, and lay down and dreamt of you,
had you ten thousand times in my arms, kissing you and
telling you how much I loved and adored you, and you
seemed pleased.... I have your heart, and it is warm at
my breast. I hope mine feels as easy to you. Thou joy of
my life, adieu!"
In another letter he exclaims:
"Oh, my dearest soul ... your dear heart is so safe with
me and feels every motion mine does. How happy will that
day be to me that brings you back! I shall be unable to
speak for joy. My dearest soul, I send you ten thousand
kisses."
So irrepressible was his passion that it burst the bounds of prose, and
gushed forth in verses such as this:
"Hear, solemn Jove, and, conscious Venus, hear!
And thou, bright maid, believe me while I swear,
No time, no change, no future flame shall move
The well-placed basis of my lasting love."
When the fair and frail Countess, in a fit of alarm, took refuge at
Eaton Hall, her Royal lover followed her in disguise, installed himself
at a neighbouring inn, and continued his intrigue under the very nose of
her jealous husband, who at last was driven to sue for divorce. He won
an easy verdict, and with it £10,000 damages--a bill which George III.
himself had ultimately to pay. Within a few months the incorrigible Duke
had another "dearest little angel" in his toils, and pursued his
gallantries without a thought of the Countess he had left to her shame.
Such was this degenerate brother of the King when the most memorable of
his victims crossed his blighting path one summer day in the year 1771,
at Brighton--a radiantly beautiful young woman who had just discarded
her widow's weeds, and was arrayed for fresh conquests.
Anne Luttrell, as the widow had been known in her maiden days, was one
of the three lovely daughters of Lord Irnham, in later years Earl of
Carhampton, and a member of a family noted for the beauty of its women,
and the wild, lawless living of its men. Her brother, Colonel Luttrell,
was the most reckless swashbuckler and the deadliest duellist of his
time--a man whose morals were as low as his temper and courage were
high.
At seventeen Anne had become the wife of Christopher Horton, a
hard-drinking, fast-living Derbyshire squire, who left her a widow at
twenty-two, in the prime of her beauty, and eager, as soon as decency
permitted, to enter the matrimonial lists again.
About this time Horace Walpole, who had a keen eye for female charms,
describes her as
"extremely pretty, very well-made, with the most amorous
eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette
beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely
mistress of all her passions and projects. Indeed,
eyelashes three-quarters of a yard shorter would have
served to conquer such a head as she has turned."
In another portrait Walpole says:
"There was something so bewitching in her languishing
eyes, which she could animate to enchantment if she
pleased, and her coquetry was so active, so varied, and
yet so habitual, that it was difficult not to see through
it, and yet as difficult to resist it. She danced
divinely, and had a great deal of wit, but of the satiric
kind."
Such were the charms and witchery of Mrs Horton when the lascivious
young Prince, who was still a boy, was first dazzled by her beauty at
Brighton; and when, in fact, she was on the eve of smiling on the suit
of one of the legion of lovers who swelled her retinue, one General
Smith, a handsome man with a seductive rent-roll to add to his
attractions. But the moment the Prince began to cast admiring eyes at
the young widow the General's fate was sealed. She had no fancy to go to
her grave plain "Mrs Smith" when a duchess's coronet (and a Royal one to
boot) was dangled so alluringly before her eyes.
For from the first she had made up her mind that she would be the
Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside
when he chose, butterfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this
she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours--after a
period of coquetry and coy reluctance--were at his disposal; but the
price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring--nothing less. And such was
the infatuation she had inspired that the Duke--flinging scruples and
fears aside, consented. One October day they took boat to Calais, and
were there made man and wife. The widow had caught her Prince and meant
the world to know she was a Princess.
For a few indecisive weeks the Duke put off the evil day of announcing
his marriage to his brother, the King, and to his mother, the Dowager
Princess of Wales, whose frowns he dreaded still more. But his Duchess
was inexorable. She declined to play any longer the _rôle_ of "virtuous
mistress" in an obscure French town, when she ought, as a Princess of
the Blood Royal, to be circling in splendour and state around the
throne.
Between his wife's tears and tantrums on one side of the Channel and the
Royal anger on the other, the Duke was driven to the extremity of his
exiguous Royal wits; until finally, in sheer desperation, he decided to
make the plunge--to break the news to the King. Had he but known how
inopportune the time was he would surely have taken the first boat back
to Calais rather than face his brother's anger. George was distracted by
trouble at home and abroad. His mother was dying; across the Atlantic
the clouds of war were massing; the political atmosphere was charged
with danger and unrest. And when the quaking Duke presented himself
before his brother as he was moodily walking in his palace garden,
George was in no mood to accept quietly any addition to his burden of
worries.
No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which
the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into
flame. "You idiot! You blockhead! You villain!" he shouted, purple in
face and hoarse with passion. "I tell you that woman shall never be a
Royal Duchess--she shall never be anything." "What must I do, then?"
gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst. "Go abroad until I
can decide what to do," thundered the King, waving his brother
imperiously away.
It was a very crestfallen Duke who returned to Calais to face the
upbraiding of Duchess Anne on his failure. But it took much more than
this to cow a Luttrell. She at least was not afraid of any king. She
would defy him to his face, and compel him to acknowledge her--before
her child was born. And within a few weeks she was installed at
Cumberland House, with all the state and more than the airs of a Royal
Princess. The days of concealment were over; she stood avowed to the
world, Duchess of Cumberland and sister-in-law to the King; and she only
smiled when George, in his Royal wrath at such insolence, announced
through his Chamberlain that "there was no road between Cumberland House
and Windsor Castle--that the Castle doors would be closed against any
who dared to visit his repudiated sister-in-law."
There were some, however, who dared to brave George's displeasure by
paying court to the Duchess, whose beauty and grace surrounded her with
a small body of admirers. The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to
perfection her new and exalted _rôle_ of Princess. "No woman of her
time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with
such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns,
the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the
Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress,
was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in
beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court
all the greatest in the land.
She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they
should appear together in the same box at the opera--an overture to
which the Duchess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously: "Never! I would
not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!"
By sheer effrontery Duchess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal
Court and public recognition as a member of George's family; and the
fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her
pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification. What her
Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had
won by brazen defiance and importunity. But the goal, though so
differently reached, was the same. Her triumph was complete.
To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen. While
they had smiled on the sempstress's daughter, who had been guilty of
precisely the same offence as herself--that of wedding a Royal Prince
without the King's sanction--they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the
daughter of a noble house; and terrible was the revenge she took. She
deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales--a youth whose
natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands. She enmeshed him
in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his
passions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he
himself was a past-master--drinking, gambling, and lust. Notorious
profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would
have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the
hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman. Thus infamously the
Duchess of Cumberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights;
and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral
degradation of their eldest son.
But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Luttrell
was an unhappy woman. She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the
social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was
empty and desolate. Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and
flaunted his fresh conquests before her face. In the royal family
circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome
stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and
not to herself. "Of all princesses," she once wrote to a friend, "I
really think I am the most miserable."
Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses,
regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written
by way of epitaph:--
"He was alive and is dead,
And, as it is only Fred,
Why, there's no more to be said."
Henry Frederick's epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand,
would have been much more scathing. His Duchess survived him a score of
years--unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in
name--harassed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of
coarse tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose
failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the
Duchess.
The fate of Elizabeth--one of the "three beautiful Luttrells"--is among
the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her Duchess-sister
died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and
actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her
liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower
depths--was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the
streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set
her free from her fetters.