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!