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