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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.