No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into flame.  “You idiot!  You blockhead!  You villain!” he shouted, purple in face and hoarse with passion.  “I tell you that woman shall never be a Royal Duchess—­she shall never be anything.”  “What must I do, then?” gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst.  “Go abroad until I can decide what to do,” thundered the King, waving his brother imperiously away.

It was a very crestfallen Duke who returned to Calais to face the upbraiding of Duchess Anne on his failure.  But it took much more than this to cow a Luttrell.  She at least was not afraid of any king.  She would defy him to his face, and compel him to acknowledge her—­before her child was born.  And within a few weeks she was installed at Cumberland House, with all the state and more than the airs of a Royal Princess.  The days of concealment were over; she stood avowed to the world, Duchess of Cumberland and sister-in-law to the King; and she only smiled when George, in his Royal wrath at such insolence, announced through his Chamberlain that “there was no road between Cumberland House and Windsor Castle—­that the Castle doors would be closed against any who dared to visit his repudiated sister-in-law.”

There were some, however, who dared to brave George’s displeasure by paying court to the Duchess, whose beauty and grace surrounded her with a small body of admirers.  The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to perfection her new and exalted role of Princess.  “No woman of her time,” says Lord Hervey, “performed the honours of her drawing-room with such grace, affability, and dignity.”  And, in spite of George’s frowns, the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress, was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court all the greatest in the land.

She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they should appear together in the same box at the opera—­an overture to which the Duchess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously:  “Never!  I would not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!”

By sheer effrontery Duchess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal Court and public recognition as a member of George’s family; and the fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification.  What her Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had won by brazen defiance and importunity.  But the goal, though so differently reached, was the same.  Her triumph was complete.