Thanks, Shinjinee. I've come across Henry Bate (the `Fighting Parson') before, in connection with my other obsession among women writers of the period, Mary Darby Robinson, otherwise known as Perdita

He certainly seems to have been a fearless journalist/ incorrigible muckraker (according to your point of view). He spent a year in prison for libel, and he was the editor who published the gossip that those in the know where merely whispering, about her affair with the Prince of Wales (otherwise known as Florizel).

That was when he was editor of the Morning Post; when he started the Morning Herald he stayed on good terms with her, and they evidently formed an alliance whereby she gave him all sorts of gossip and he reported her sympathetically.