Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Read online

  Courtiers

  The Secret History of Kensington Palace

  Lucy Worsley

  ‘Those who have a curiosity to see courts and courtiers dissected must bear with the dirt they find.’1

  JOHN HERVEY

  Notes

  1. John Hervey, Some Materials towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, Ed. Romney Sedgwick, Vol. 2 (London, 1931), p. 347.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Map

  Family Trees

  Cast List

  Preface

  ONE

  To the Palace

  TWO

  The Petulant Prince

  THREE

  The Pushy Painter

  FOUR

  The Wild Boy

  FIVE

  The Neglected Equerry

  SIX

  The Woman of the Bedchamber

  SEVEN

  The Favourite and his Foe

  EIGHT

  The Queen’s Secret

  NINE

  The Rival Mistresses

  TEN

  The Circle Breaks

  ELEVEN

  The Survivors

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  Index

  Plates

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  PLATE SECTION

  Kensington Palace, set in the middle of its famous gardens.

  Courtiers having tea at Lord Harrington’s house.

  The King’s Grand Staircase, leading up to the state apartments at Kensington Palace.

  Peter the Wild Boy and Dr Arbuthnot.

  Mohammed and his colleague Mustapha, two of George I’s most trusted servants.

  A woman thought to be Queen Caroline’s milliner, Mrs Tempest.

  Robert and Franciscus, assistants to painter William Kent.

  Unknown ladies with fan and child.

  King George I.

  Sir James Thornhill: the older, well-established painter who had fully expected to decorate Kensington Palace.

  The Cupola Room at Kensington Palace.

  The talented and bumptious William Kent, with his actress-mistress, Elizabeth Butler.

  Herrenhausen: the beautiful garden palace outside Hanover where George I invested much money and effort.

  George I’s mausoleum, overlooking his beloved gardens at Herrenhausen.

  The spot in the River Leine, Hanover, where legend tells that the murdered body of George I’s adulterous wife’s lover was thrown by members of the Hanoverian court.

  Mustapha and Mohammed in the garden of a German hunting lodge.

  George II and Queen Caroline.

  Frederick, Prince of Wales and his sisters.

  William Hogarth’s painting of a theatrical performance, with Lady Deloraine in the audience.

  John Hervey, holding his ceremonial purse of office as Lord Privy Seal.

  John Hervey’s letter book, with certain pages mysteriously missing.

  The iron collar worn by Peter the Wild Boy.

  Queen Caroline.

  Henrietta Howard at the age of thirty-five.

  George II in old age.

  TEXT ILLUSTRATIONS

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court bowling pavilions

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east front

  Prince George Augustus

  Princess Caroline

  Henrietta Howard

  London’s royal residences in the 1720s

  St James’s Palace

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east gardens

  George I

  A bird’s-eye view of St James’s Palace

  The crowded drawing room at St James’s Palace

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east front

  William Kent at work with his pen

  The main rooms rebuilt in the 1720s

  William Kent’s sketch for the drawing-room ceiling, Kensington Palace

  In this print William Hogarth calls Kent by the shortest word for the female genitalia

  Ulrich Jorry, the loud-mouthed dwarf

  Mohammed and Mustapha

  William Kent and Elizabeth Butler

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east front

  Poor Peter, the wild child found in the woods

  One of many newspaper cuttings showing the ‘Wild Youth’

  How to bow, an art you learnt from your dancing master

  The brilliant Dr John Arbuthnot

  Molly Lepell

  Detail from sketch of Kensington Palace’s gardens

  John Gay

  Courtiers enjoying themselves by the Round Pond to the east of Kensington Palace in 1736

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court bowling pavilions

  John Hervey

  A satirical print called The Festival of the Golden Rump

  The south view of Kensington Palace

  The king’s, the queen’s and the mistress’s apartments at Kensington Palace

  A cook, sketched by William Kent

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, south front

  Frederick, Prince of Wales

  Augusta’s refuge from the in-laws: the house that William Kent created for the Prince and Princess of Wales at Kew

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east front

  Caroline’s ‘room of her own’: the library William Kent designed for her at St James’s Palace

  William Kent’s portrait of the mature Queen Caroline

  William Hunter’s engraving of an unborn baby, 1752

  The obese Queen Caroline, sketched on her deathbed by one of her ladies

  Detail from sketch of the south view of Kensington Palace

  George II with his late-life mistress, Amalie

  A court mantua

  William Kent

  Princess Amelia

  Detail from sketch of Kensington Palace The aged King George II

  Peter the Wild Boy in his later years

  Detail from sketch of the south view of Kensington Palace

  The King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace

  Detail from sketch of Hampton Court, east front

  Map

  Hanover was one of many small German states. Its ruler, or Elector, helped ‘elect’ the states’ overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor

  Family Trees

  HOW THE HANOVERIANS WERE RELATED TO THE STUARTS

  THE HANOVERIANS

  Cast List

  George I, the king

  George Augustus, the Prince of Wales

  Caroline, the Princess of Wales

  Frederick, the foolish heir to the throne

  Amelia, a prickly princess

  Molly Lepell, a Maid of Honour

  Henrietta Howard, a Woman of the Bedchamber

  John Hervey, the Vice-Chamberlain

  Peter the Wild Boy, a court pet

  William Kent, a pushy painter

  Elizabeth Butler, an actress, Kent’s mistress

  Mohammed True-to-the-King, keeper of the king’s closet

  Mustapha, a Turkish valet

  Dr Arbuthnot, a physician and satirist

  John Gay, a penniless poet

  Ulrich Jorry, a dwarf entertainer from Poland

  Preface

  ‘I will send you a general map of Courts; a region yet unexplored … all the paths are slippery, and every slip is dangerous.’1

  (Lord Chesterfield, 1749)

  The Great Drawing Room, crammed full of courtiers, lay at t
he heart of the Georgian royal palace. Here the king mingled most evenings with his guests, signalling welcome with a nod and displeasure with a blank stare or, worse, a turned back.

  The winners and the losers of the Georgian age could calculate precisely how high they’d climbed – or how far they’d fallen – by the warmth of their reception at court. High-heeled and elegant shoes crushed into the floorboards of the drawing room the reputations of those who’d dropped out of favour, while those whose status was on the rise stood firmly in possession of their few square inches of space.

  In the eighteenth century, the palace’s most elegant assembly room was in fact a bloody battlefield. This was a world of skulduggery, politicking, wigs and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like flick knives. Intrigue hissed through the crowd, and court factions were also known as ‘fuctions’.2

  Beneath their powder and perfume, the courtiers stank of sweat, insecurity and glittering ambition.

  *

  The ambitious visitors crowding into the drawing room were usually unaware that they were under constant observation from behind the scenes. The palace servants – overlooked but ever-present – knew of every move made at court. That’s why, in this book, we’ll meet kings and queens, but also many of the people who worked to meet their most intimate needs.

  The Georgian royal household was staggeringly vast and complicated. The highest ranking of its members, the courtiers proper, were the ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting. These noblemen and women were glad to serve the king and queen in even quite menial ways because of the honour involved.

  Beneath them in status were about 950 other royal servants, organised into a byzantine web of departments ranging from hairdressing to rat-catching, and extending right down to the four ‘necessary women’ who cleaned the palace and emptied the ‘necessaries’ or chamber pots.3

  If you want to know what these people looked like, you need only visit Kensington Palace. There, in the 1720s, the artist William Kent painted portraits of forty-five royal servants that look down upon palace visitors from the walls and ceiling of the King’s Grand Staircase.

  Kensington Palace itself had existed long before the Hanoverian dynasty arrived in Britain to replace the Stuarts in 1714, yet it was also the one royal home that George I and his son really transformed and made their own. The servants there witnessed romance and violence, intrigue and infighting, and almost unimaginable acts of hatred and cruelty between members of the same family.

  I often find myself climbing the King’s Grand Staircase during the course of my working day, and the faces of the people populating it have always fascinated me. I’ve spent many hours studying them, wondering who they all were, and curiosity finally compelled me to try to find out.

  When I first began investigating their identities, I was surprised to discover that some of the names traditionally attached to the characters were wrong, while other obvious connections had been overlooked. My efforts to unearth each sitter’s true story led me on a much longer and more exciting journey than I’d expected, through caches of court papers in London, Windsor, Oxford and Suffolk. I found myself examining paintings at Buckingham Palace, gardens in Germany, and hitching lifts from kind strangers in rural Hertfordshire. My adventures both in and outside the archives led eventually to this book.

  Those picked to sit for the staircase paintings were the most appealing, exotic and memorable among the lower servants. Some of them possessed something rarer than rubies: the influence that came with access to the royal ear. Their colleagues included some of the oddest characters of the Georgian age: a dwarf comedian; a feral boy; a rapacious royal mistress; a mysterious turbaned Turk; bored if beautiful Maids of Honour. I’ve selected the stories of just seven of them to illuminate the strange phenomenon of the Georgian court and to give a new perspective upon the lives of the kings, queens and princes inhabiting the rarefied court stratosphere above their heads.

  *

  While the monarchy was slowly sinking in status throughout the eighteenth century, the glamour of the court still attracted the pretty, the witty, the pushy and the powerful.

  But although Kensington Palace teemed with ambitious and clever people in search of fame and fashion, it was also a lonely place, and courtiers and servants alike often found themselves weary and heart-sore. Success in their world demanded a level head and a cold heart; secrets were never safe. A courtier had to keep up appearances in the face of gambling debts, loss of office or even unwanted pregnancy.

  Thousands longed to be part of the court, but John Hervey, one of our seven, knew all too well that danger lay hidden behind the palace walls.

  ‘I do not know any people in the world’, he wrote to a courtier colleague, ‘so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room.’4

  Notes

  1. Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters written by the late right honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his son Philip Stanhope, esq., published by Mrs Eugenia Stanhope, Vol. 1 (London, 1774), p. 442.

  2. W. S. Lewis (Ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (Oxford, 1937–83) Vol. 9, p. 202.

  3. William A. Shaw (Ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books (January–December 1716) (London, 1957) pp. 321–2.

  4. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 625.

  ONE

  To the Palace

  ‘Really, it must be confessed that a court is a fine thing. It is the cause of so much show and splendour that people are kept gay and spirited.’1

  (James Boswell, 1763)

  Prince George Augustus had bulging, bright-blue eyes

  On 25 April 1720, a special sense of anticipation was building in the fashionable parts of London. The party planned at St James’s Palace that night was the most hotly anticipated court occasion for many years.

  Nowhere was the excitement greater than in the rambling old mansion called Leicester House. This building, dominating the north side of Leicester Fields, was the home of the king’s son and daughter-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales, George Augustus (1683–1760) and Caroline (1683–1737). While the prince and princess were losing their looks and fast approaching middle age, they remained a jovial, lively and friendly couple.

  Tonight’s entertainment, though, would sorely strain their good spirits. They were going to have to pay a reluctant visit to the court of King George I (1660–1727).

  *

  The late afternoon saw Prince George Augustus berating a clumsy servant as he struggled into an outfit of peacock splendour. He aimed to be ‘always richly dressed, being fond of fine clothes’.2

  Bad-tempered, full of bluster, fond of music and of fighting, this prince would become best known as George II, the last British king to lead troops in person upon the battlefield. He struts through Britain’s history books like a kind of tin-pot dictator: brusque, pompous and a little bit ludicrous. Despite his tantrums, though, he deserves at least a pinch of sympathy. Like all courtiers, he spent his days performing a part upon a stage.

  Unfortunately, for a man of his gaudy tastes, he was considerably shorter than average.3 He had bulging china-blue eyes and his prominent nose was rather Roman.4 He also had an imperious temper: ‘vehement, and irritable’, ‘hot, passionate, haughty’.5 But his anger could cool as quickly as it came. He had the great redeeming feature of being passionately in love with his wife, the fat, funny and adorable Princess Caroline. He would rely upon her for the strength and steadiness to face the difficult evening that lay ahead.

  She, meanwhile, was growing flustered as the Women of her Bedchamber tried to lace up her stiff stays.

  Plump, yet pin-sharp, Princess Caroline had a sweet smile, and blossomed into beauty when her face and mouth were in motion. Wilhelmine Karoline of Ansbach, as she was born, had been celebrated in her youth as the ‘most agreeable Princess in Germany’.6 Her arms were admired for their ‘whiteness and elegance’; she had ‘a penetrating eye’ and an ‘expressive
countenance’. Princess Caroline could split sides with her amusing impressions, loved a quick-fire duel of wit and spoke English ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’.7 Friend of the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton, she would in due course become the cleverest queen consort ever to sit upon the throne of England.

  Princess Caroline: fat, funny and adorable

  With her greater intellectual skills, humour and sense of style, Princess Caroline would have made a far more successful heir to the crown than her husband, but the odds for opportunity were always stacked against eighteenth-century women. Caroline kept her husband subtly but firmly under her thumb, and always contrived ‘that her opinion should appear as if it had been his own’.8