Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (31 page)

This was the end of Sophy’s career: ‘her pining cheek betray’d her inward smart/ her breaking looks foretold her breaking heart’.
²²²
Yet Sophy was quickly old news at court, and the courtiers complained that ‘poor Howe’s misfortune, is all our theme, and that is almost worn out, so you must send us something new’.
²²³
It showed the truth of John Hervey’s opinion that it was rare for a personal disgrace at court to be ‘anything more than the novel of a fortnight, which everybody would recount and everybody forget’.
²²⁴

The Maids of Honour had also lost their old crony, poet John Gay, who’d eventually given up the search for court office in disgust. Driven at last by financial need to real effort, he wrote the spectacular theatrical success
The Beggar’s Opera
, with its wicked digs at Sir Robert Walpole.

Dr Arbuthnot could not deny that Gay’s masterpiece contained ‘a great deal of true low humour’, but the outrage and trouble it generated made it much harder and riskier for writers and theatres to stage political plays.
²²⁵
When Gay himself tried to bring out a sequel,
Polly
, Walpole promptly had the work banned. John Gay did not long outlive his disappointment, for in 1732 Dr Arbuthnot attended his old friend’s deathbed. He reported that Gay ‘dy’d of an inflammation, and I believe at last a mortification of the bowels; it was the most precipitate case I ever knew, having cut him off in three days’.
²²⁶

At the time that Henrietta left court, John Gay’s old flirting
partner Molly Hervey was spending a much-needed three-month break in France. This left the coast clear for her husband John to deepen his acquaintance with Anne Vane. Mistress Vane was the poor deluded Maid of Honour who had been taken up and cast aside by a number of courtiers, including some of the very highest rank. She and John Hervey went swiftly from ‘ogling’ each other to sending ‘messages, from messages to letters, from letters to appointments, and from appointments to all the familiarities’. Anne Vane would wrap herself in a cloak and slip on foot into the Hervey household, where ‘they often passed the whole night together’.
²²⁷

Molly now expected nothing from this unreliable husband of hers, and they were described as living ‘as if not married at all’ in a loose, uninterested union.
²²⁸
‘Marriage is like drinking,’ John Hervey said, ‘it begins with being our cordial & ends with being our poison.’
²²⁹
Sadly the glow of the court’s former
Schatz
(or ‘treasure’) was now extinguished by domestic duties: she was ‘a fatigued nurse, a grieved sister, and a melancholy wife’, marooned when in England with her children on the Hervey family estate, Ickworth in Suffolk.
²³⁰

‘I know laudanum can at any time lend me a stock [of good spirits] for present use,’ Molly admitted, but she understood its risks: that repeated indulgence would run her ‘greatly in arrears, and considerably lessen [her] principal, which is already too much impaired to bear a further diminution’.
²³¹
She was right to be careful: laudanum is a powerful and addictive mixture of alcohol and opium.

She was much better off with her old pastime of illicit reading, being on occasion happily and ‘mightily taken up with a book’ of Elizabethan letters.
²³²

*

‘The number of stories & contradictory reasons given for Lady Suffolk’s removing from court wou’d fill more than an ordinary length of one of my letters,’ wrote one courtier soon after the great event.
²³³
Queen Caroline condemned Henrietta’s departure as ‘the
silliest thing she could do’, while the newspapers thought it reprehensible, desirable and incomprehensible in equal measure.
²³⁴

But the real explanation was that the death of Henrietta’s husband had removed the ‘danger of falling into his hands’, and that Henrietta herself was ‘desirous to have liberty & a little more time at her own command’.
²³⁵
Her true friends thought that ‘not only her master & mistress but her very enemies will have reason to repent the part they have acted by her’.
²³⁶

After her resignation had created the sensation of a fortnight, though, the waters began to close over Henrietta’s memory. Returning to London in January 1735, John Hervey ‘expected when [he] came to town to hear a great deal about Lady Suffolk; but they talk of her no more than if she did not exist, or than if she never had existed, one might as well ask questions about Henry II and Fair Rosamund; it would hardly seem a story more out of date’.
²³⁷

Despite her loss of position, fame and untold opportunities for ‘frizelation’, it seemed that Henrietta had made a lucky escape. Some of her old colleagues commiserated with her loss of station: ‘all ye
beau-monde
that us’d to crowd about your
toilettes
will avoid you, as if you had got ye plague’.
²³⁸
Yet it seems very doubtful that Henrietta much missed the beau monde’s shallow company.

As Jonathan Swift said of his friend, she’d had little need of her numerous virtues at court.
²³⁹
The loss of the king’s favour had at first seemed like a setback, but with it the stage was set for her redemption. Henrietta could at last unpack from her chest of virtues her talent for writing and wit and friendship. She would also now have the good fortune to discover which of her acquaintances were really loyal and true to her, something she ‘cou’d never have found out without this change’.
²⁴⁰

And there was also another, hidden, reason driving Henrietta forward on her path of propulsion from the court. While the king had been falling out of love with her, Henrietta was herself falling in love with somebody else.

The next scandal at court was to be the news of her unexpected and very hasty marriage.

*

The court was once again electrified by the news of Henrietta’s swift wedding to Member of Parliament George Berkeley. It took place on 26 June 1735, consummating a relationship that had begun in secret well before her delicate negotiation of her exit from the palace. As the wedding was so unexpected, there was a torrent of gossip: ‘the town’s surpris’d, & the town talks, as the town loves to do on these ordinary extraordinary occasions’.
²⁴¹

In John Hervey’s opinion, ‘Mr Berkeley was neither young, handsome, healthy, nor rich’, and he heard people wondering what had induced Henrietta ‘to deviate into this unaccountable piece of folly’.
²⁴²
Others joked cruelly about ‘her deaf-ear, & his lame-leg’ and thought it repulsive that such old people should retire together to the ‘bed on purpose bought, for ye unexpected nuptials’.
²⁴³
But George Berkeley was nevertheless only forty-two to Henrietta’s forty-six, and her escape from court life had left her looking ‘better than [she] did seventeen years ago’.
²⁴⁴
One of Berkeley’s relations congratulated him upon his wise choice of wife, in which ‘the most agreeable beauties of the mind are joined to those of the body’.
²⁴⁵

Some imagined that the marriage ‘was to pique the King’, but if indeed it had been, Henrietta’s aim was confounded. He wrote to Caroline that
‘ma vieille maîtresse’
had married
‘ce vieux goutteux
George Berkeley’
, and that
‘je m’en rejouis fort!
’ [My old mistress has married gouty old George Berkeley, and I’m really happy about it!].
²⁴⁶

In fact, Berkeley was kind, loving and honest, and his correspondence with his wife shows they shared a deep bond that was admired by all their friends. And, far from being cut by the fashionable world, the couple hosted that summer ‘a greater court now at Marble Hill than at Kensington’.
²⁴⁷

Safe, happy, in love at last, Henrietta had nothing to regret about leaving the court. She had also picked the perfect moment to leave, barely escaping the explosion of the most violent royal quarrel yet.