Rare. ESTC records copies at BL; University of Texas Austin, University of Pennsylvania, and the Huntington. OCLC adds a copy at Stanford University.
A collection of letters exchanged between Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland (1745-1790) and Lady Henrietta Grosvenor (1745-1828) during their ill-fated affair. The scandal caused a great deal of embarrassment to the royal family, not least because of the £10,000 fine he was forced to pay to Lord Grosvenor as damages for the “criminal conversation” with his wife.
Lady Grosvenor survived the scandal and her divorce relatively well thanks to the support of other women testifying against her husband, while Prince Henry continued his philandering ways and eventually caused his brother to ban future royal marriages from happening without express permission from the monarch.
“My angel! EXCUSE me if, in the extravagance of my joy, I thank you again and again for the favours of last night. Oh! my —–! a man must think as I think, love as I love, and feel as exquisitely as I feel, ere he can be sufficiently grateful for obligations, which, though they will always be remembered, can never be repaid”
The letters contained within this volume paint a picture of the Duke as a man clumsy in his passion for his more level-headed but still enamoured mistress - the names of both of whom have been censored in the text. Early in the correspondence he is forced to apologise for accidentally sending her to the wrong meeting location: “I have nothing to offer, in mitigation of my crime, but that transported with the enchanting idea of clasping you in my arms, I could not write like a man in his senses” (p.3). Lady Grosvenor also has to admonish him multiple times to be more careful about how he corresponds with her, particularly after an episode in which her husband finds one of the Duke’s letters and shows it to her mother, who she says “immediately sent for me, and taxed me with infidelity”, though luckily also “promised that she would discover nothing, if I would vow an eternal reformation” (p.14). Despite this promise, the affair continued until “the adventure of St. Alban’s” (p.27), after which, despite the Duke’s reassurance that “I have already taken measures to pacify his ––––, and I have not a doubt but I shall succeed” (p.28), the cuckolded “brute of a lord” Grosvenor (p.11) “determined to litigate the affair in —– Commons” (p.32).
The affair was discovered by Lord Grosvenor after he intercepted one of the letters between the pair and his servants were able to find them during a meeting at a St. Alban’s Inn. The servants broke into the lady’s room and, according to a contemporary published account of the Duke’s trial for criminal conversation, found her sitting on the bed next to the Duke with “her breasts wholly bare and exposed”. The story of the affair, the Duke’s trial, and the subsequent divorce proceedings between Lord and Lady Grosvenor were of great public interest due to the involvement of royalty and the large amounts of scandalous evidence, all of which was circulated widely in the press.
Though she was not a party in the criminal conversation trial, which focused solely on the damage done to Lord Grosvenor’s reputation by the Duke, Lady Grosvenor found allies in witnesses such as the prostitute Abigail Beau Germain, who declared that she was testifying against the character of Lord Grosvenor (one of her customers) not because she was on the side of the Duke, but “merely to serve Lady G. and to support the cause of the whole sex”. Lady Grosvenor’s ability to recruit such testimony against her husband allowed her to win a judgement in the later divorce trial that forced him to continue paying her an allowance, which allowed her to keep living quietly and comfortably, if not extravagantly, until she could remarry after his death. The Duke of Cumberland, on the other hand, continued to find new ways to scandalise his royal brother as well as the rest of the country. When he finally married it was in secret, to a woman named Anne Horton- a commoner rather than a royal princess as the king would have wanted. This move led to Henry’s most enduring legacy: the introduction by George III of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which forbid descendants of George II from marrying without the permission of the reigning monarch.
J. Wheble in London also printed several editions of a larger collection of letters relating to this case plus the proceedings of the criminal conversation case, entitled The genuine copies of letters which passed between His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland and Lady Grosvenor; Her Ladyship’s letters to the Hon. Miss Vernon, … the anonymous letters, signed Jack Spratt, … To which is annexed, a clear … account of the trial … o the 5th of July 1770; wherein … Lord Grosvenor was plaintiff, and … the Duke of Cumberland, defendant, …. The verso of the title page of that collection states “since the Cause between the Duke of Cumberland and the Lord Grosvenor has been determined, several Pamphlets have been published wherein they declare in their Title-Page to have given the WHOLE of the Correspondence; whereas, they have inserted…only a PART of the WHOLE, I have therefore… reprinted those which have appeared, and added the Remainder from the Manuscripts in my Possession.” It is possible that this copy is one of the “incomplete” pamphlets referred to.
