On
22 October 1766, just prior to his twenty-first birthday, the prince was created
Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn and
Earl of Dublin.
On
4 March 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
2 October 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 -- she was a daughter of
Simon Luttrell, Earl of Carhampton, and the widow of Christopher Horton of Catton Hall -- 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."
The marriage between Anne Horton and Prince Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, was described as a “conquest at Brighthelmstone” by Mrs. Horton, the widow of one Christopher Horton of Calton Park, Derbyshire, “who had for many months been dallying with his passion, till (sic) she had fixed him to more serious views than he had intended.”
The Duke of Cumberland died in
London on
18 September 1790.*
7 November 1745–22 October 1766:
His Royal Highness Prince Henry Frederick of Wales
*
22 October 1766–18 December 1790:
His Royal Highness The Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn
It is, however, notable that the Mrs Houghton to whom Walpole refers may be Nancy (“Anne”) Parsons, the daughter of a Bond Street tailor, 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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