Mrs. Clayton had now great influence with the Queen, more indeed than any one except Walpole, with whom she came frequently into collision. She was an irritating woman with an overwhelming sense of self-esteem. Horace Walpole calls her “an absurd pompous simpleton”. Lord Hervey credits her with all the virtues, and declares that she possessed an excellent understanding and a good heart. She undoubtedly possessed cunning and ability, which she used to such advantage that she ultimately procured for her stupid husband a peerage, as Viscount Sundon, and she foisted a large family of needy relatives on to the public service. She acted as a sort of unofficial private secretary to the Queen and became the medium of all manner of communications to her mistress. Many of the letters written to her were really addressed to Caroline. Walpole heartily disliked Mrs. Clayton and tried in vain to shake her influence with the Queen. Her ascendency was inexplicable to him for years, but at last he thought that he had discovered the reason. When Lady Walpole died, the Queen asked him many questions about his wife’s last illness and persistently referred to one particular malady from which, in point of fact, Lady Walpole had not suffered. The Prime Minister noticed it, and when he came home he said to his son: “Now, Horace, I know by the possession of what secret Lady Sundon has preserved such an ascendant over the Queen”. Whether her influence was wholly due to this cause is open to question, for she stood in high favour before her mistress’s malady began. But for long years Caroline suffered from a distressing illness of which she would rather have died than have made it known, and Mrs. Clayton was one of the few who knew her secret.
All the maids of honour except Miss Meadows had changed since the King and Queen were last at Hampton Court, but these young ladies were still of a lively temperament. One evening in the darkness several of them played at ghost, and stole out into the gardens and went round the palace rattling and knocking at the windows. Lady Hervey, who had heard of these frolics, writes to Mrs. Howard: “I think people who are of such very hot constitutions as to want to be refreshed by night walking, need not disturb others who are not altogether so warm as they are; and it was very lucky that looking over letters till it was late, prevented some people being in bed, and in their first sleep, otherwise the infinite wit and merry pranks of the youthful maids might have been lost to the world.”[22]
But, however lively may have been the young maids of honour, one member of the Queen’s household found Hampton Court dull under the new reign and its glory departed. Writing to Lady Hervey Mrs. Howard says:—
“Hampton is very different from the place you knew; and to say we wished Tom Lepell, Schatz and Bella-dine at the tea-table, is too interested to be doubted. Frizelation, flirtation and dangleation are now no more, and nothing less than a Lepell can restore them to life; but to tell you my opinion freely, the people you now converse with” (books) “are much more alive than any of your old acquaintances.”[23]
Mrs. Howard had a good reason to be dispirited, for the new reign had proved a sad disappointment to her. She had expected, and so had her friends, that the King’s accession to the throne would bring her an increase of power, wealth and influence, which would have helped to compensate her for the equivocal position she occupied, a position which, as she was a modest woman, could not have been altogether congenial to her. “No established mistress of a sovereign,” says Horace Walpole, “ever enjoyed less brilliancy of the situation than Lady Suffolk.” The only benefit she received was a peerage for her brother, Sir Henry Hobart, and at the end of a long and trying career at court she managed to amass a sum, not indeed sufficient to give her wealth, but to save her from indigence. The Queen once said that Mrs. Howard received £1,200 a year from the King all the time he was Prince of Wales, and it was increased to £3,200 a year when he became King. He also gave her £12,000 towards building her villa at Marble Hill, near Twickenham, besides several “little dabs” both before and after he came to the throne. But this represented all that Mrs. Howard gained, if indeed she gained so much; patronage or influence she had none, and those who placed their trust in her found themselves out of favour. After a while the courtiers began to find out that it was more profitable to pay their suit to Mrs. Clayton, who had the ear of the Queen, than to Mrs. Howard, who had not the ear of the King. Yet the King still continued to visit Mrs. Howard for some three or four hours every evening, at nine o’clock, “but with such dull punctuality that he frequently walked up and down the gallery for ten minutes with his watch in his hand if the stated minute was not arrived”.[24] The Queen was doubtless glad to get rid of him for a time, but Mrs. Howard must have suffered sadly from the tedium of entertaining her royal master on these daily visits, and certainly deserved more than she got in the way of recompense. She had, as one puts it, “the scandal of being the King’s mistress without the pleasure, the confinement without the profit”. The Queen took care that the profit was strictly limited.
The King was so mean that at one time he even suggested, indirectly, that the Queen should pay Mrs. Howard’s husband out of her privy purse for keeping himself quiet. This was too great a tax even on Caroline’s complaisance and in one of her bursts of confidence she told Lord Hervey that when Howard insisted on his wife returning to him, “That old fool, my Lord Trevor, came to me from Mrs. Howard, and after thanking me in her name for what I had done, proposed to me to give £1,200 a year to Mr. Howard to let his wife stay with me; but as I thought I had done full enough, and that it was a little too much not only to keep the King’s guenipes” (in English trulls) “under my roof, but to pay them too, I pleaded poverty to my good Lord Trevor, and said I would do anything to keep so good a servant as Mrs. Howard about me, but that for the £1,200 a-year I really could not afford it”. So Howard’s silence was bought out of the King’s pocket, and Mrs. Howard’s maintenance was partly provided by him, and partly by the Queen, who gave her a place in her household and so threw a veil of respectability over the affair.
Mrs. Howard found that she gained so little by the King’s accession, that she wished to retire from court, but was not allowed to do so. Meanwhile all her nominations were refused. She seems to have shown her resentment in divers ways. Her refusal to kneel during the ceremony of the Queen’s dressing was perhaps one manifestation of it. With regard to her uprising and retiring, her dressing and undressing, Queen Caroline followed the custom which had been observed by all kings and queens of England until George the First, who refused to be bound by precedent in this matter. Caroline performed the greater part of her dressing surrounded by many persons. The Queen, who had a great idea of what was due to her dignity, desired that the bedchamber-woman in waiting should bring the basin and ewer and present them to her kneeling. Mrs. Howard objected to this, and, considering the peculiar relations which existed between her and the King, her objection was natural enough. But the Queen insisted. “The first thing,” said Caroline to Lord Hervey later, “this wise, prudent Lady Suffolk” [Mrs. Howard] “did was to pick a quarrel with me about holding a basin in the ceremony of my dressing, and to tell me, with her little fierce eyes, and cheeks as red as your coat, that positively she would not do it; to which I made her no answer then in anger, but calmly, as I would have said to a naughty child, ‘Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will. Go, go! fie for shame! Go, my good Howard; we will talk of this another time.’”
Mrs. Howard went, and in her dilemma wrote to Dr. Arbuthnot to inquire of Lady Masham, who had been at one time bedchamber-woman to Queen Anne, whether this disputed point was really according to precedent. She got little comfort from Lady Masham, who through Arbuthnot replied:—
“The bedchamber-woman came into waiting before the Queen’s prayers, which was before her Majesty was dressed. The Queen often shifted in a morning; if her Majesty shifted at noon, the bedchamber-lady being by, the bedchamber-woman gave the shift to the lady without any ceremony, and the lady put it on. Sometimes, likewise, the bedchamber-woman gave the fan to the lady in the same manner; and this was all that the bedchamber-lady did about the Queen at her dressing.
“When the Queen washed her hands the page of the backstairs brought and set down upon a side-table the basin and ewer, then the bedchamber-woman set it before the Queen, and knelt on the other side of the table over against the Queen, the bedchamber-lady only looking on. The bedchamber-woman poured the water out of the ewer upon the Queen’s hands.