“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 L10,000 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: