Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (15 page)
Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
Many of the ladies upon the staircase, probably colleagues of Mrs Tempest such as dressers, seamstresses and laundresses, are holding fans, and the fan could sometimes speak. The secret and allusive language in which messages were conveyed by a fan’s position in the hands would not become formalised and codified until much later in the century. But it seems more than a curious accident that according to its conventions, all these women are speaking along the same lines. The lady in green tells the Scottish gentleman ‘your flattery annoys me’. The lady next to Mohammed taps her left cheek, signifying ‘no’. The lady with the dog says, ‘I am not in love with you.’
Either this is a coincidence or else the language of fans existed earlier than historians think, and William Kent was enjoying the irony of portraying all these cruelly virtuous females with their languishing looks and emphatic denials.
*
Finally, on the staircase’s ceiling, Kent added in four more personal portraits. He included himself – the cherubic, rosy-cheeked Signior, ‘fat and hot’ – and the two assistants, Robert and Franciscus, who helped him with the work. Kent’s self-portrait provides a complete contrast to the rather stiff, uptight approach chosen by Sir James Thornhill in the painting mentioned earlier. Both wear a plain brown coat, but Thornhill’s cravat is knotted tightly while Kent’s is loose. Thornhill wears a formal wig; Kent wears a relaxed turban. Thornhill’s hand is carefully poised, his
brush loaded, while Kent nonchalantly brandishes his palette while being diverted by conversation. Thornhill is solitary; Kent is the focus of admiring attention. Indeed, lit from below, the cheeks of Kent and his assistants glow and their eyes sparkle as if they are actors upon a stage. There is no doubt that this is the coming man.
Elizabeth Butler: was she married to William Kent or not? The two were certainly on-and-off partners for nearly a lifetime
Whispering into Kent’s left ear as she nonchalantly taps her fan on the balustrade is a real actress: the lady presumed to be his lover, the formidable Elizabeth Butler.
98
With perhaps more romance than truth, it was claimed that Elizabeth was ‘an illegitimate daughter of a noble duke’.
99
Kent lived ‘in particular friendship’ with her and had begun to spend his free time, when he was not required by Lord Burlington, at her home in Leicester Fields.
100
At the date of the painting she was still early on in her career. She would later become renowned for playing frightening females: a fierce Lady Macbeth and a brutal Gertrude.
101
In 1726, a year that began with heavy snow, the murals on the Grand Staircase were nearly finished. George I would shortly pronounce that the staircase pleased him ‘very much’ and that he approved ‘of everything’. Like clients everywhere, though, he was impatient for completion, wanting to know ‘how long it would be before Mr Kent would have done’.
102
But Kent was adding one last figure into his painting. This was a boy with strange curly hair, whose even stranger story had been the talk of London since his arrival upon the drawing-room scene in April of 1726. Shortly after his first court appearance, it was reported that he ‘hath begun to sit for his picture’.
103
This enigmatic boy is our next courtier.
1
. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 2, p. 159.
2
. Jourdain (1948), p. 37.
3
. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 1, p. 476 (17 October 1749).
4
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 24 (1935–6) (Vertue IV), p. 163.
5
. BL Add MS 75358, William Kent to Lord Burlington (27 January 1739).
6
. BL Add MS 75358, Lady Burlington (4 November 1731); Sherburn (1956), Vol. 4, p. 140, Alexander Pope to Countess of Burlington (29 October 1739).
7
. Chatsworth MS, William Kent to Lady Burlington (14 December 1738), quoted in Jourdain (1948), p. 86.
8
. Sherburn (1956), Vol. 4, p. 125, Alexander Pope to the Countess of Burlington (
c
.8 September 1738).
9
. Tabitha Barber, ‘Thornhill, Sir James (1675/6–1734)’,
Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography
(Oxford, 2004).
10
. Letter from Queen Caroline to Princess Anne quoted in R. L. Arkell,
Caroline
of Ansbach
(London, 1939), p. 297.
11
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 18 (1930) (Vertue I), p. 45.
12
. John Hutchins,
The history and antiquities of the county of Dorset
(London, 1774), Vol. 1, p. 410; third edn revised by William Shipp and James Whitworth Hodson (London, 1868), Vol. 3, p. 675.
13
. Franklin (1993), p. 92.
14
.
Weekly
Journal or Saturday
’
s
Post
, issue 130 (27 May 1721).
15
. HMC
Portland
, Vol. 5, p. 602 (23 August 1720).
16
. Thomas Tickell,
Kensington Garden
(London, 1722), p. 1.
17
. John Haynes,
Kensington
Palace
(London, 1995), p. 2.
18
. Rizzini to the Duke of Modena (20 January 1695), quoted in Martin Haile,
Queen Mary of Modena, her life and letters
(London, 1905), p. 310.
19
. TNA Work 4/1 (13 June 1716).
20
. HMC
Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Polwarth
, Vol. 1 (London, 1911), p. 176.
21
. L. S. Wright and M. Tinling (Eds),
William Byrd
,
The London Diary
,
1717–21
(New York, 1958), p. 127.
22
. J.M. Beattie,
The English Court in the Reign of George I
(Cambridge, 1967), p. 274.
23
. TNA Work 6/11, p. 2 (1715); TNA T 56/18, Lord Chamberlain’s warrants, p. 34 (2 July 1717).
24
. TNA Work 6/7, p. 148 (19 December 1719).
25
.
Ibid.
, p. 68 (19 June 1718).
26
. Peter Gaunt and Caroline Knight, an unpublished history of Kensington Palace, Historic Royal Palaces (1988–9), Vol. 2, p. 304.
27
. John Holland,
The History, Antiquities, and Description of the Town and Parish
of Worksop
(Sheffield, 1826), p. 176.
28
. TNA Work 6/7, p. 153.
29
. Kroll (1998), p. 231.
30
. BL Add MS 22227, ff. 98–100, Peter Wentworth to Lord Strafford (25 July 1729).
31
. HMC, 15th Report
, Manuscripts of the Earl of Carlisle
, appendix, part 6 (London, 1897), p. 35 (19 August 1721).
32
. John Arbuthnot,
Mr Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox
(London, 1722), p. 3.
33
. Romney Sedgwick,
The House of Commons,
1715–54
(London, 1970), Vol. 2, p. 115.
34
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 18 (1929–30) (Vertue I), p. 100.
35
. TNA T 1/243, No. 70 (14 February 1723).
36
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 18 (1929–30) (Vertue I), p. 100.
37
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 17 (1933–34) (Vertue III), p. 139.
38
. William Kent to Burrell Massingberd (26 June 1713), quoted in Jourdain (1948), pp. 27–8.
39
. Michael I. Wilson,
William Kent
(London, 1984), p. 16; HMC 12th Report, appendix, Part III,
The Manuscripts of Earl Cowper
(London, 1889), Vol. 3, p. 122.
40
. William Kent (1719), quoted in Jourdain (1948), p. 46.
41
. Barbara Arciszewska,
The Hanoverian Court and the Triumph of Palladio
(Warsaw, 2002), p. 279.
42
. TNA Works 6/7, p. 272, ‘
la proposition de Monsr. Kent pour peindre la Voute de la
Grande Chambre
’.
43
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 22 (1933–34) (Vertue III), p. 139.
44
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 18 (1929–30) (Vertue I), p. 100.
45
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 22 (1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 55.
46
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 18 (1929–30) (Vertue I), p. 101.
47
. John Gay, ‘Epistle IV’,
Poems
(1720), p. 306.
48
. TNA Work 6/7, pp. 272–4.
49
. Beard (1981), p. 25.
50
.
Ibid
., pp. 90–2.
51
. TNA Work 6/7, pp. 273–4 (22 May 1722).
52
. R. D. Harley,
Artists’ Pigments, c.
1660–1835
(London, 1982) p. 44.
53
.
Ibid
., p. 152.
54
.
Ibid
., p. 71.
55
. HMC,
Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections
, Vol. 8 (London, 1913), p. 368 (12 December 1723).
56
. HMC
Carlisle
, appendix, part 6, p. 42, Sir John Vanbrugh to Lord Carlisle (19 July 1722).
57
. BL Add MS 78514 B, ‘Journal of Sir John Evelyn Baronet’, f. 64v (1 July 1722).
58
. TNA Work 4/2, f. 80r (15 August 1722).
59
.
Ibid.
, f. 81v (22 August 1722).
60
. TNA Work 6/7, p. 277 (22 August 1722).
61
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 22 (1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 140.
62
. Horace Walpole,
Anecdotes of painting in England
(second edn, Strawberry Hill, 1771), Vol. 4, p. 137.
63
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 22 (1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 19.
64
. TNA T 56/18, p. 232 (5 October 1726); Edward Impey,
Kensington Palace
,
The
Official Illustrated History
(London, 2003), p. 69.
65
. John Murray Graham (Ed.),
Annals and Correspondence of the Viscount and the
First and Second Earls of Stair
(Edinburgh and London, 1875), Vol. 2, p. 94.
66
.
The Walpole Society
, Vol. 22 (1933–4) (Vertue III), pp. 35–6.
67
.
Ibid
., p. 68.
68
. William Aikman to Sir John Clerk (15 July 1725), quoted in John Fleming,
Robert Adam and his Circle
(London, 1962), p. 39.
69
. Haynes (1995), p. 22.
70
. BL Add MS 20101, f. 30r (12 May 1735).
71
. Ruth Guilding, ‘Sculpture at Holkham’,
Country Life
(6 March 2008), p. 85.
72
. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 1, p. 444.
73
. Beattie (1967), pp. 48, 174.
74
. Anon.,
The Present State of the British Court
(London, 1720).
75
. BL 1890c.1 (Miscellaneous Tracts), Book II; George Bickham,
Apelles
Britannicus
(London, 1741), p. 28.
76
. Rudolf Grieser (Ed.),
Die Memoiren des Kammerherrn Friedrick Ernst von
Fabrice (1683–1750)
(Hildesheim, 1956), p. 126; BL Add MS 40843, f. 9r.
77
. Anon, attributed to Dr Arbuthnot or Jonathan Swift,
It cannot Rain but it
Pours
, part two (London, 1726), p. 4.
78
. Grieser (1956), p. 126.
79
. The painting is in the Royal Collection. Oliver Millar,
Pictures in the Royal
Collection, Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian Pictures
(London, 1963), No. 616; Jürgen Prüser,
Die Göhrde
(Hildesheim, 1969), pp. 68–70.
80
. BL Add MS 47028, f. 7v, John Percival (26 January 1715); Anon.,
Some Memoirs
of the life of Lewis Maximilian Mahomet, Gent. Late Servant to his Majesty
(London, 1727) (copy kindly provided by Esther Godfrey)
.
81
. BL Stowe MS 563, William III’s bedchamber orders, which were still presumably at least officially in force in the reign of George I (11 June 1689, a copy made in 1736).
82
. TNA SP 1/47, f. 55; Frederick J. Furnivall (Ed.),
The Babees Book, etc.
, Early English Text Society (London, 1868), p. 180.
83
. Hatton (1978), p. 206.
84
. J. J. Caudle, ‘Mohammed von Königstreu, (Georg) Ludwig Maximilian (
c.
1660–1726)’,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford, 2004).
85
.
Ibid.
86
. TNA LC 5/89 f. 4v (29 May 1717; 24 January 1720).
87
. TNA LC 5/89 f. 5v (25 September 1718).
88
. TNA LS 13/115 f. 121v (2 August 1722).
89
. Anon.,
Lewis Maximilian Mahomet
(1727), pp. 11, 15.
90
. Early nineteenth-century editor’s note in Croker (1824), Vol. 1, p. 269 (spotted by Joanna Marschner); ‘E. Tempest, Milliner’ is mentioned in RA GEO/ADD17/75/71 (1733).
91
. E. Tempest supplied Caroline with three yards of ‘Black frinch Lace’ in 1733, RA GEO/ADD 17/75/78.
92
. Samuel Pegge,
Curialia: or an Historical Account of Some Branches of the Royal
Household
(London, 1791), Vol. 1, p. 84.
93
. Colonel Sir Reginald Hennell,
The History of the King’s Body Guard of the
Yeomen of the Guard
(London, 1904), p. 23.
94
. Saussure (1902), p. 40.