Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Read online

  In spite of Princess Caroline’s infectious laughter and her cleverness, and despite Prince George Augustus’s visibly lavish love for his wife, he inflicted a regular humiliation upon her: he was carrying on an affair with one of Caroline’s servants, and future conflict was inevitable.

  *

  At the time of his birth in 1683, the possibility that George Augustus would become Prince of Wales had seemed almost preposterously small. Both he and Caroline came from dinky little principalities that now form part of modern Germany. They’d only immigrated to Britain in 1714, when George Augustus’s father, later King George I, had unexpectedly inherited the British throne because of the accidental failure of the Stuart line of monarchs.

  Britain’s previous queen, Anne, had endured seventeen pregnancies in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to squeeze out an heir. Her failure to produce a healthy child brought the Stuart line to a stuttering stop, with the exception of her Catholic half-brother. Anne’s elder sister, Mary, had deposed their father James II in 1688 because of his despotic and Catholic regime. This was the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’.

  The choice faced at Anne’s death, then, was either to recall James II’s Catholic offspring or to look back up the trunk of the Stuart family tree to identify a Protestant branch.

  The Act of Settlement of 1701 tidied up the problem. It specified that the small, Protestant house of Hanover should provide Anne’s successors. This was to be at the expense of the exclusion of fifty nearer relatives, who were regrettably but unacceptably Catholic.

  Upon Anne’s death in 1714, the Hanoverian succession unfolded surprisingly smoothly, and the small, provincial court of Hanover crossed the Channel to London. The Electoral Prince, Georg Ludwig of Hanover, became King George I of Great Britain, while his son and daughter-in-law became Prince and Princess of Wales.

  But the great transformation in their fortunes in 1714 was the beginning, not the end, of this family’s troubles.

  *

  All across London, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s courtiers and supporters were likewise preening and squeezing themselves into their court clothes. As the sun sank, each of the ladies was reaching the end of a toilette that had taken two hours or more. ‘Lud! Will you never have done fumbling?’ grumbled many a modern lady to her maid.9

  Once her figure had been transformed into the right shape by tight stays and a hooped petticoat, a female courtier was required to put on her court uniform. The ‘mantua’, as it was known, was an archaic, uncomfortable but supremely elegant form of dress. Pale forearms descended from wing-cuff sleeves with the requisite three rows of ruffles (‘I am so incommoded with these nasty ruffles!’10). Long trains spilt at the back from tightly seamed waists. The mantua’s skirts were spread out sideways over immensely wide hoops, too broad to pass through a door. ‘Have you got the whalebone petticoats among you yet?’ Jonathan Swift wrote from court. ‘A woman here may hide a moderate gallant under them.’11

  Any female courtier would be altogether unrecognisable without her warpaint, ‘pale, dead, old and yellow’.12 So maids were busily painting their mistresses with ‘rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and bosoms, jet eyebrows and scarlet lips’, and puffing powder over piled coiffures. Once trussed up and coloured, the female courtiers resembled the beauties in Mrs Salmon’s famous London gallery of waxworks, and had carefully to avoid the fire for fear ‘of melting’.13

  Meanwhile, the male courtiers were donning coat, waistcoat and breeches encrusted with embroidery. Their shoe buckles were jewelled, and each would rest a hand upon the hilt of a sword. On their heads, the itchy and sweaty full-bottomed periwig was still in fashion. Between each gentleman’s left elbow and his side was clenched his chapeau-bras: a flat, unwearable parody of a hat, for the head was never covered in the presence of the king.

  ‘Dress is a very foolish thing,’ declared the arch-courtier Lord Chesterfield, and yet, at the same time, ‘it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed’.14

  *

  Two junior members of Princess Caroline’s household at Leicester Fields were preparing with particular care, because they and their colleagues would be the subject of intense and critical scrutiny on this special evening.

  Mrs Henrietta Howard was one of the six Women of Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber. The Princess’s most senior servants were the Ladies of the Bedchamber, peeresses one and all. The Women of the Bedchamber, slightly lower down the social scale but still well-born, did the real work of dressing and undressing, watching and waiting. But Henrietta had both an official and an unofficial job. As well as being Princess Caroline’s servant, she was also the recognised mistress of Caroline’s husband. Neither role brought her much pleasure.

  Henrietta Howard. She had a ‘romantick turn of mind’, an ‘air of sadness’ – and an alcoholic bully for a husband

  Now in her thirty-first year, Henrietta was not an astounding beauty. Yet her build was slim, she had ‘the finest light brown hair’ and she was ‘always well dressed with taste and simplicity’.15 (This ‘beautiful head of hair’ had played a small but significant role in her life story so far.16) Unlike many royal mistresses, she had not exploited her position to amass influence and riches. She was of a ‘romantick turn of mind’, thoughtful, gentle, but ‘close as a cork’d bottle’.17 Her friend, the poet Alexander Pope, accused her of ‘not loving herself so well as she does her friends’, and he also described a grievous ‘air of sadness about her’.18

  No wonder, for her life had been difficult. She was now living apart from her brutal, heavy-drinking husband. Orphaned at a young age and looking for security, marriage had looked like a safe option. But marrying Charles Howard had turned out to be a terrible mistake.

  And she had very little hold on the affections of the other problematic partner in her life, her royal lover. Prince George Augustus rather reluctantly felt that it would be beneath his princely dignity to remain faithful to his wife, and he had a mistress only out of a sense that he ought to. So he was often cruel and abrupt with Henrietta.

  She, too, was dreading the palace drawing room. Despite her privileged position as royal mistress, for her it held the risk of an unpleasant encounter with the husband who’d given her nothing but unhappiness, bruises and destitution.

  *

  By sharp contrast, Henrietta’s junior colleague in the royal household, Molly Lepell, was dancing round her dressing room in delight. She was one of the merry Maids of Honour, a good-looking and audacious gang of girls whose job was to decorate and animate Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline’s court.

  Born in the very first year of the eighteenth century, the now nineteen-year-old Molly was nicknamed ‘The Schatz’, German for ‘treasure’. Part of her charm was her bottomless fund of jokes. She even mockingly (and wrongly) disparaged her own looks. ‘I am little,’ she said, but at least ‘there are many less’. ‘I am strait, the shoulders low … the neck long, the throat frightful, the head too large, the face flat … as to my hair it has nothing to make it tolerable, it grows badly, not thick, and of a pale and ugly brown’.19

  In fact, she had big grey eyes, lustrous skin and an elegant, waiflike figure; she was the darling of the celebrity-obsessed London crowds.

  Molly’s father had bequeathed her the curse of breeding without the money to flaunt it. He’d fraudulently entered his baby girl upon the payroll of his army regiment, so that she got a salary unearned.20 But the scam could not last, and Molly was sent out to earn her living as a palace good-time girl at a very young age. She certainly had all the easy graces of the courtier, having been ‘bred all her life at courts’. She also understood Latin perfectly well, though wisely she concealed her skill.21 (A lady’s ‘being learned’ was ‘commonly looked upon as a great fault’.22)

  Uniquely among her frivolous friends, her fellow Maids of Honour, Molly was a good keeper of secrets. She was astonishingly composed and inscrutable for someone so young. Some people inevitably found her
polished professional social manner insincere: she seemed to be ‘of the same mind with every person she talked to’.23 Others found her playful wit cutting rather than amusing, and her jokes ‘extreme forward and pert’.24

  But this smooth surface disguised a young woman who was ‘very passionate’ underneath. ‘I find it beneath me not to be able to disguise it,’ Molly explained, and she hid the essence of herself behind her endless jokes.25 ‘I look upon felicity in this world not to be a natural state, and consequently what cannot subsist,’ she wrote in a rare unguarded moment.26 Depression was her great secret enemy.

  Tonight, for once, pleasure and excitement held it at bay. Unlike the other occupants of Leicester House, Molly could not wait for the evening to begin. The other Maids of Honour had no inkling that she’d recently thrown herself headlong into a mad, bad affair of the heart. The night would bring her once more into the company of her beloved.

  *

  At about 7 o’clock, going to court began their swaying journeys across London. It would be foolish to walk: the jeers of hostile passers-by, rain and mud were all to be avoided, and the streets of the St James’s district ought certainly ‘to be better paved’.27

  London’s royal residences in the 1720s

  A bristling bevy of red-clad Yeomen of the Guard preceded the sedan chairs of the Prince and Princess of Wales as they led the procession of their servants and supporters out of Leicester Fields. Ladies in court dress had to be literally crushed into sedan chairs, ‘their immense hoops’ folded ‘like wings, pointing forward on each side’. To accommodate their ‘preposterous high’ headdresses, they had to tilt their necks backwards and keep motionless throughout the journey.28

  Their destination, the old palace of St James’s, was not particularly impressive. It had been a poorly designed, makeshift mansion for the monarchy since the great palace of Whitehall burned down in 1698. An eighteenth-century guidebook called it ‘the contempt of foreign nations, and the disgrace of our own’; a visiting German confirmed that it was ‘crazy, smoky, and dirty’.29

  Although cramped and unsuitable, St James’s Palace still provided the stage upon which the Georgian court’s most important rituals were performed. To the courtiers its atmosphere was heady, dangerous but absolutely irresistible: ‘full of politicks, anger, friendship, love, fucking and foppery’.30

  Many of the people who weren’t invited to palace parties would have claimed the court was no longer the beating heart of the nation that it had once indisputably been. There was Parliament, now, as an alternative arena for politics. Kings and queens no longer ruled by divine right. Monarchy was on the decline.

  And yet, while all this was true, the early years of the eighteenth century were to see a last great gasp of court life and a late flowering of that strange, complex, alluring but destructive organism called the royal household.

  The personal was still political at the early Georgian court. The king’s mood, even his bowel movements, could determine the fate of many, as even now he was called upon to make real decisions about the running of the country. His opinion still mattered, and, as contemporaries showed by packing themselves into its drawing room or by begging for jobs as servants, the palace was still a seat of power.

  *

  As they approached the palace’s lofty red-brick gatehouse, the sedan chairmen carrying Henrietta and Molly in Princess Caroline’s wake had to force a passage through a raucous, torch-lit crowd. Hundreds of people had gathered expectantly to catch a glimpse of the blazing ‘beauties’ arriving in their jewels.31

  Molly Lepell, along with her friend Mary Bellenden, another Maid of Honour, received the loudest sigh of admiration. Although they were not yet twenty, these two were the toast of their generation, and each was as lively and as pretty as the other. Then, as now, society beauties provided the shot of style and celebrity that the masses craved. One popular London ballad promised to expose

  What pranks are played behind the scenes,

  And who at Court the belle –

  Some swear it is the Bellenden,

  And others say Lepell.32

  The arrival of the matchless Mary and Molly elicited the kind of greedy, semi-salacious gasp that still runs up and down red carpets today when the stars appear.

  St James’s Palace: ‘crazy, smoky, and dirty’. The courtiers’ route to the drawing room is marked

  Through the palace gatehouse lay the Great Court, where soldiers kept guard. It was also called the ‘Whalebone Court’ after the whale’s skeleton, 20 feet long, that was clamped to one wall33 Here a sea of servants and stationary sedan chairs jostled to drop people off before the fine columned portico sheltering the entrance to the royal apartments. The palace authorities complained constantly about all this traffic blocking the courtyards and passages.34

  Emerging gingerly from their chairs, Molly, Mary and their colleagues were now faced with a wide and grand staircase. Here the scarlet-costumed Yeomen of the Guard acted as security staff and bouncers, refusing entry to the humbly or unsuitably dressed.

  There was no official protocol involving invitations. To gain admission you simply had to look the part, so it was vital to swagger and to pretend to be ‘mightily acquainted and accustomed at Court’.35 One would-be gatecrasher, an enterprising young law student, was turned away at the bottom of the stairs. He went to a nearby coffee house for half an hour, returned refreshed, and discovered that a shilling pressed into the guard’s hand was the key to getting through.36

  The ladies of Princess Caroline’s household were much more readily admitted. They pushed upwards and onwards, taking the tiny, geisha-like steps permitted by their hoops, their gait giving the impression of wheeled motion. They glided through the first-floor guard room, then the adjoining ‘presence’ and ‘privy’ chambers. Their destination was the large new drawing room built by Queen Anne overlooking the park and hung with ‘beautiful old tapestries’.37

  This was the ‘Great Drawing-Room’, where, four nights a week, ‘the nobility, the ministers & c.’ were accustomed to meet, ‘and where all strangers, above the inferior rank, may see the King’.38

  *

  Here, at last, is the Georgian court en masse. There is scarcely room to breathe, the air is ‘excessive hot’, and the crush has prevented many of the nobility even from entering. Chairs are completely absent from the room so that nobody can make the mistake of sitting down in the royal presence.

  The courtiers’ colours are pale and sparkling. The penniless poet John Gay, hopeful of a royal patron, arrays himself in silver and blue as he asks himself, ‘How much money will do?’39 Knights of the Garter wear blue sashes; senior courtiers’ staffs of office are white. The court’s young bloods sport pale-blue silk coats, while their older colleagues have ‘blue noses, pale faces, gauze heads and toupets’.40 A glittering gown is spotted ‘with great roses not unlike large silver soup plates’.41

  The silver is relieved with touches of crimson: a red sash for a Knight of the Bath; a gentleman in a ‘prodigiously effeminate’ rose-coloured waistcoat; the stout Princess Caroline in pink, ‘superior to her waiting nymphs/ as lobster to attendant shrimps’.42

  Princess Caroline, Prince George Augustus and their party become the centre of attention immediately upon entering. All the most ambitious young courtiers behaved dutifully to the king when he was present, but preferred to pay their court to the younger, bolder, more promising heir to the throne. Peter Wentworth, a junior official, observed that on drawing-room nights, many people were ‘backward in speaking to the King, tho’ they are ready enough to speak to the Prince’.43

  While the king’s party had the greater power, the prince’s had the greater glamour.

  *

  The younger courtiers now fought to fawn over Prince George Augustus, and drawing-room behaviour was often surprisingly ugly. In the crush people would ‘jostle and squeeze by one another’, shouting ‘pardon’ over their shoulders; it was simply ‘impossible to hold a conversation’.44 E
veryone laughed when Lord Onslow tumbled ‘backward among all the crowd’ and lay sprawling, while another gentleman, ‘drunk and saucy’, had to be ejected for throwing a punch.45

  In his sector of the drawing room, George Augustus spoke one by one to those courtiers desperately trying to catch his attention. He turned his backside to those he did not wish to acknowledge, a technique known as ‘rumping’. The ‘rumped’ or spurned could console themselves with having earned membership of the exclusive ‘Rumpsteak Club’.

  This was boorish behaviour, and Prince George Augustus was not the handsome, charming prince of a fairy tale. His peppery personality and ‘the fire of his temper’ appeared ‘in every look and gesture’.46 He would let off steam rather comically by kicking his hat, and sometimes even his wig, around the room.47 A sufferer from high blood pressure, he was subject to ‘constant palpitations about the region of the heart, especially after dinner’.48

  This prince, then, had passion. He made an excellent soldier when his courtiers’ concerns for his safety allowed him to take the field. At the decisive European battle of Oudenarde in 1708, he’d led a celebrated cavalry charge against the enemy, ‘and had his horse shot under him’; military trivia remained his greatest interest.49

  In the drawing room on this particular evening, he faced a challenge that demanded rather more subtlety than a cavalry charge, though it was equally daunting for him to face.

  He was about to have to be polite to the father he loathed.

  *

  After a long and painful period of gossiping, jostling and waiting, a whisper ran like wildfire around the room. A door from an inner chamber opened, and the king appeared.