Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn
Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn (
November 27,
1745 -
September 18,
1790) was the sixth child of
Frederick, Prince of Wales and
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and a younger brother of King
George III.
On March 4, 1767 the Duke of Cumberland allegedly married Olive Wilmot (later Mrs Payne), a commoner, in a secret ceremony. There reportedly was one child,
Olivia Wilmot (
1772-
1834) from this relationship, though the duke's parenthood was never proven. A landscape painter and novelist, Olivia Wilmot married John Thomas Serres, 1759-1825, and later, controversially, assumed the style of Princess Olivia of Cumberland.
The Duke's marriage to the commoner Lady Anne Horton (or Houghton) (1743-1808) on
October 2,
1771 was the catalyst for the
Royal Marriages Act 1772, which forbids any descendant of
George II to marry without the monarch's permission. There were no children from this marriage. Lady Anne, though from a good family seems to have been rather loose with her favors, given one wag's comment that she was "the Duke of Grafton's Mrs Houghton, the Duke of Dorset's Mrs Houghton, everyone's Mrs Houghton."
Titles
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1745-1766:
His Royal Highness Prince Henry Frederick of Wales
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1766-1790:
His Royal Highness The Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn
It was Nancy ("Anne") Parsons to whom Horace Walpole referred as "The Duke of Grafton's Mrs. Haughton, the Duke of Dorset's Mrs. Haughton, everybody's Mrs. Haughton". Walpole, Memoirs and Portraits, 195.
Walpole described the marriage between Anne Horton and Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, as a "conquest at Brighthelmstone" by Mrs. Christopher Horton [not Haughton], the widow of one Christopher Horton of Calton Park, Derbyshire, "who had for many months been dallying with his passion, till she had fixed him to more serious views than he had intended." Walpole, Memoirs and Portraits, 244.
Nancy ("Anne") Parsons, the daughter of a Bond Street tailor, was a noted prostitute of wit and beauty. According to Walpole, Nancy had been a figurante in the opera when she began supplementing her income by working as a highly-paid prostitute. Her youth and undeniable beauty (as attested by later portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds) subsequently caught the attention of a member of the Haughton dynasty of West Indies slave merchants, who married her and took her to Jamaica. Upon his death she returned to London and resumed her profession.
Ironically, Nancy Parson's beauty had outlived many of her aristocratic detractors. In addition to a grand-manner portrait by Reynolds, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, a portrait of Nancy Parsons in Turkish masquerade dress, painted by George Willison in 1769, is held by the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut. Nor was she bereft of attention after she spurned the Duke's platonic love. At the age of 40, Nancy Parsons turned to the very young and impressionable, 24-year old John Frederick Sackville, Duke of Dorset. In 1776 Parsons captivated and married another young aristocrat, Charles Maynard, second Viscount Maynard. In old age, it is said, Nancy devoted herself to pious good works.
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Portrait of the Duchess of Cumberland
