To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen.  While they had smiled on the sempstress’s daughter, who had been guilty of precisely the same offence as herself—­that of wedding a Royal Prince without the King’s sanction—­they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the daughter of a noble house; and terrible was the revenge she took.  She deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales—­a youth whose natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands.  She enmeshed him in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his passions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he himself was a past-master—­drinking, gambling, and lust.  Notorious profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman.  Thus infamously the Duchess of Cumberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights; and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral degradation of their eldest son.

But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Luttrell was an unhappy woman.  She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was empty and desolate.  Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and flaunted his fresh conquests before her face.  In the royal family circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and not to herself.  “Of all princesses,” she once wrote to a friend, “I really think I am the most miserable.”

Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses, regretted by none, execrated by many.  Of his father it had been written by way of epitaph:—­

    “He was alive and is dead,
    And, as it is only Fred,
    Why, there’s no more to be said.”

Henry Frederick’s epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand, would have been much more scathing.  His Duchess survived him a score of years—­unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in name—­harassed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of coarse tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the Duchess.

The fate of Elizabeth—­one of the “three beautiful Luttrells”—­is among the most tragic stories of the British Peerage.  When her Duchess-sister died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her liberty.  On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower depths—­was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set her free from her fetters.

CHAPTER VIII