Letitia (Letty) Lade nee Derby was likely a member of the Drury Lane working class before rising to tonnish circles. Some sources suggest her father was a sedan chair operator and that she herself was a cook at a brothel. Rumored to be the mistress (or Free Love Consort) of highwayman “Sixteen String Jack” Rann (who was executed in 1774) and later the mistress of the Duke of York, she eventually caught the eye of Prinny. According to a 1894 source: “a skilled horsewoman…(she) regularly attended th Windsor hunt. It was at one of these meetings that she attracted the attention of the Prince of Wales by her bold riding.”
Letitia managed to climb the social ladder enough to capture the attention of Sir John Lade, a man noted for being a bruising rider and driver. Her natural abilities with the horsewhip, coupled with her larger than life yet attractive appearance (one contemporary wrote Lady Lade was “a very large woman, standing six feet high without her shoes.”) made her a good match for the owner and breeder of horses and intimate of Prinny.
Married after a long affair and no small amount of family censure in 1787, Lady Letty Lade wasted no time in adopting many of the fashions and habits of her husband. She was said to swear so casually, it was “overwhelming” and became a catch phrase for the Prince…”Whenever the Prince wanted to give an idea of the particular blackguardism of one of his friends, His Royal Highness would politely say, “He swears like Letitia Lade!” (1872, The Athenaeum)
The “Amazon” as she was fondly referred, was said to be able to “withstand the fiercest assault and renew the charge with renovated ardour, even when her victim sinks drooping and crestfallen before her”, understanding the intricacies and wit of the Georgian and later Regency era enough to ingratiate herself, if not with the Upper Orders, at least a fair amount of Prinny’s cronies. It was not uncommon to see her at the hunt, or at a prize fight, and she frequently tooled about Town and Brighton in a phaeton four in hand. According to the Memoirs of George the Fourth: “She was…well up with the hounds” and able “to envince a perfect knowledge of all the technical phrases of coachmanship, not an individual in the whole hunt could compete with Lady Lade; nor was she excelled by even Sir John himself, who was the tutor of the Prince of Wales in the art of driving.”
It was her driving that made her forever notorious:
The Lades entertained their own fashionable rakish crowd at their own house at Cant’s Hill, and at Brighton. Lady Lade died in 1825, and Lord Lade passed some years later in 1838. From humble beginnings, her skill and spunk made her a definite, if not scandalous, woman of character for both the later part of the Georgian and majority of the Regency eras.
More about Letty: http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.blogspot.com/2009/01/tart-of-week-lady-letitia-lade.html
