Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (19 page)

These were the role models that Princess Caroline followed,
steeper, braver paths to climb than those conventionally chosen by English princesses.

And as well as clucking over the intellectuals who congregated in her drawing room, she was also a good mistress to her servants: wise, witty and maternal.

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So the Wild Boy eventually found himself part of the prince and princess’s household in Leicester Fields, discovering a snug place under Caroline’s wing. Dr Arbuthnot continued to visit his pupil and would also drop in on his friend Henrietta Howard. (She thought he didn’t come often enough, and when he tried to make an exit he would find himself ‘prettily chid for leaving’.
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) Leicester House remained a magnet for everyone and anyone talented or droll. The reversionary interest still ensured that the ‘most promising of the young lords and gentlemen’ and the ‘prettiest and liveliest of the young ladies’ were to be found there.
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As we already know, gaiety and glamour were brought to Princess Caroline’s household by the Maids of Honour. A previous, promiscuous generation of Maids had liberally bestowed their favours ‘to the right and to the left and not the least notice taken of their conduct’.
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At the very creation of Princess Caroline’s household in 1714, equerry Peter Wentworth noted that the town had ‘named four beauties for Maids to her Highness’, rightly predicting that the princess’s husband would be ‘very sociable’ among them and that there’d be trouble if Caroline herself had ‘any spice of jealousy’.
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The older, colder members of the court constantly complained about the Maids of Honour’s ‘little levities’: an obsession with the new dresses to be worn on the king’s birthday, with novels and romances, and with infuriating ‘merry pranks’ played late at night.
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‘People who are of such very hot constitutions as to want to be refresh’d by night-walking’, ran one complaint, ‘need not disturb others who are not altogether so warm as they are.’
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Princess Caroline’s Maids of Honour included the flighty and selfish Sophy Howe. Naughty and saucy Sophy was quick to
exploit – and indeed to abuse – the relaxed atmosphere of the junior court. When told off for giggling in chapel by the Duchess of St Albans and being informed that ‘she could not do a worse thing’, Sophy pertly (but truthfully) answered, ‘I beg your Grace’s pardon, I can do a great many worse things.’
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One of these ‘worse things’ took place on the evening when Sophy and the Duchess of Marlborough had too much to drink at dinner. ‘“Lady Duchess, let us do something odd,” Sophy suggested, “let us make – in the stone passage,” and so they did before all the footmen.’
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The dash is tantalising. We don’t know if they made love or water or simply a spectacle of themselves.

In Sophy’s letters the Maids of Honour sound like pupils at a riotous girls’ boarding school. Updates addressed to her friend Henrietta Howard are full of news about potential partners: during one country visit she wrote that Henrietta would be wrong to assume that there was no flirtation to be had among the provincial gentlemen. But an absence from London meant an absence from the most desirable male matches and made her ‘more sensible than ever’ of her happiness in being a Maid of Honour.
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She was also cruel to her mother and dangerously addicted to the dizzy, giddy side of life at court.

So the charmed circle of the Maids of Honour generally found their lives cheerful and comfortable. One of their number, belonging to the household of Princess Caroline’s daughter Anne, extolled the conveniences of life in a royal household:

This was not a bad life, if you could bear the rules and lack of privacy.

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‘And who would not go to the Devil, for the sake of dear Molly Lepell?’ (court ballad)

 

In defence of the Maids’ philosophy of relentless fun, the former Maid Molly Hervey (neé Lepell) explained that she personally hated ‘to look on the dark side of life’ and would ‘always be thankful to those who turn[ed] the bright side of the lantern’ towards her.
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Molly had by now left Princess Caroline’s household, having been eventually forced to admit the marriage to John Hervey that disqualified her from her post. Her husband’s elder brother Carr had died in 1723, so John himself was now in line to inherit his family’s titles. Molly remained much at court with her new name of Lady Hervey, but some of her former friends found her less sympathetic than before. Her husband, arch and critical, had begun to taint her with his own bleak cynicism.

Alexander Pope, an admirer of the old Molly Lepell, was hurt when the news of her marriage finally came out. Previously he and she had been happy talking and walking together ‘three or 4 hours, by moonlight’ in the palace gardens.
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But Pope began to turn against her as she became contaminated by her husband’s affected manners. ‘Let me tell you, I don’t like your style,’ he wrote plainly
in answer to a letter of Molly’s. ‘Methinks I have lost the Mrs L. I formerly knew, who writ and talk’d like other people (and sometimes better).’
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(‘Mrs L’ was Molly before her marriage, when like all unmarried ladies she was addressed as ‘Mistress’ Lepell.)

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was another who had preferred the lovers separately rather than as a pair: she quickly grew ‘weary of those Birds of Paradise’. She also thought that Molly had acquired new and exaggerated airs and graces: she’d become ‘the top figure in town’, condescending to show herself ‘twice a-week at the drawing room and twice more at the opera for the entertainment of the public’.
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Perhaps inevitably, by 1726 the stylish, stylised Hervey couple were gradually growing apart. Maybe it was John’s neglect that encouraged Molly to treat her six-year-old marriage a little less seriously, or perhaps it was the depressing realisation that she and her husband were still spending their way towards insolvency.

Her father-in-law, the Earl of Bristol, could not have been fonder of Molly herself, but he wished his son had married someone with more money. He castigated John for having even entertained the thought of ‘marrying any woman without a considerable fortune’.
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On the other hand, Molly’s mother-in-law, Lady of the Bedchamber Lady Bristol, had never liked her, and they were well known for quarrelling together like the fishwives of Billingsgate Market.
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Now, perhaps feeling a little empty inside, Molly began to mirror the caricature of herself as the brittle court lady – ‘the finely-polished, highly-bred, genuine woman of fashion’ – by entering into an intrigue that did her reputation no good.
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Molly had long been a practised flirt, collecting admirers as others collected snuff boxes. Even Voltaire, when he visited England, was soon writing to her about the ‘passion’ she had kindled within him.
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Despite the elderly king’s supposed preference for fat women, he too was smitten by the ethereal Molly’s ‘soft and sprightly’ grey eyes, which she used to open ‘a little wider than ordinary’.
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And he was also captivated by the spiky, sparky personality
that comes through in Molly’s derisive catalogue of her own considerable charms (‘I had forgot my eyebrows. Observe that they are not very handsome, but well enough’).
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In 1725, the year before Peter the Wild Boy came to court, rumours swirled around that Molly had finally solved her financial problems. The gossips had it that she’d deliberately gone ‘to the Drawing-Room every night, and publicly attracted his Majesty in a most vehement manner’ which was ‘the diversion of the town’.
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It was said that Melusine had paid Molly
£
4,000 to break off her increasingly flagrant relationship with the king.

Yet the rumours were just rumours, and Molly was equally criticised for
not
having had a royal affair. ‘Lady Hervey, by aiming too high, has fallen very low,’ commented Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She ‘is reduc’d to trying to persuade folks she has an intrigue, and gets nobody to believe her’.
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Even the shameless flattery penned by the poets about their former favourite, Molly Lepell, was not quite straightforward. It began to contain a mocking, spiteful note, typical of an age when wit had a cutting edge, but hurtful nonetheless. Lord Chesterfield and William Pulteney wrote a poem about Molly that would have soured upon her as she discerned its double meaning:

Molly herself was ‘in a little sort of miff’ about this ballad, which flashed around the court in an instant, and asked for the double entendres to be deleted. But her friend Dr Arbuthnot thought her philosophical: ‘not displeas’d I believe with the ballad, but only with being bit’.
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At the time of Peter the Wild Boy’s arrival, Princess Caroline had just lost the services of yet another Maid of Honour, Mary Howard. She’d had to resign because of her marriage, on 14 March 1726, to Henry Scott, first Earl of Deloraine, one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to Prince George Augustus.
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Soon to be widowed, though, Lady Deloraine would later return to become a court figure of great consequence.

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Princess Caroline, the Maids of Honour and the Women of the Bedchamber were all fascinated by Peter. Petted and cosseted by the ladies of Leicester House, he settled down as well as could be expected. Yet he gave back very little, showing no affection and demanding inexhaustible patience. The female courtiers began to treat him as a joke, spreading it about that his sturdy body and his lack of speech would make him a fine, discreet toy boy.

Only the endlessly protective Princess Caroline and Dr Arbuthnot stood between Peter and a life as a character in a freak show.

The Wild Boy’s overnight social success had been achieved at great cost to his high spirits and love of freedom. In Daniel Defoe’s words, he’d made an extraordinary ‘leap from the woods to the court; from the forest among beasts … to the society of all the wits and beaus of the age’. But despite the care that was lavished upon him, Peter was simply a creature in captivity. It was clear that really he longed ‘to run wild again in the woods’ and ‘to live as he did before’.
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And he was not the only courtier to find the palace more like a prison.