Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
And while his position may have been lowly, Wentworth had one huge advantage over the absent Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline: close contact with the couple’s captive daughters.
At Kensington Palace, he would often have encountered these girls, the king’s granddaughters, coming from a lesson in their ‘learning room’ or going out to ride.
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After the ‘christening quarrel’, these three girls were never returned by George I to their parents’ care.
The eldest, Princess Anne, now aged seventeen, was ‘very pale, and would be good-looking were she not marked by small-pox’.
26
The disease had struck in April 1720, at the very height of the ‘christening quarrel’. At the time, the king had informed Princess Caroline through Mohammed that she could visit her daughter, but that she was not to bring a doctor as he’d made his own medical arrangements.
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Whatever these arrangements were, Anne survived but was severely scarred.
Anne was born in Hanover. Like the rest of the courtiers she’d become multilingual, speaking ‘German and French to perfection’. She also knew ‘a great deal of history and geography’, spoke English ‘very prettily’ and danced ‘very well’.
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Conscious of a girl’s inferior position, she was overheard wishing that she had no brothers and claiming that ‘I would die tomorrow to be queen to-day!’
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Next in line after Anne came Amelia, aged fifteen in 1726. When Amelia too fell ill, Princess Caroline was desperate with worry about her daughter’s treatment and furious with the king’s medical staff. She complained that Dr Bussier had wanted ‘to give
[Amelia] a vomit of Hypococyana. I tremble at that … My fears & the opposition I meet with are endless,’ she wrote, ‘these animals have propos’d a flannel shift to make her sweat.’ And of the physician who suggested it: ‘I believe I could … have pull’d out his eyes.’
30
Amelia was ‘a handsome blonde with charming features’, and possessed ‘much the prettiest person’ of the whole family.
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But she also had rather more acidity and intelligence than was quite appropriate in a Georgian princess, and suffered for it. She developed a reputation for being gruff and outspoken, for being overfond of music, for scandalously attending chapel ‘in riding clothes with a dog under her arm’.
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Amelia’s sharp tongue could be devastating, and one courtier complained that she told people just as many ‘shocking things to their faces’ as ‘disagreeable ones behind their backs’.
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However, her friends thought that Amelia (or ‘Emily’) had a character improved by her bluntness: one of the ‘oddest princesses ever known’, she had ‘her ears shut to flattery, and her heart open to honesty’.
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The third daughter, Caroline, named for her mother, was at thirteen a placid and prematurely maternal character, ‘very tall and stout, and looks like a woman’, with ‘very dark hair’.
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She was the quietest and most conscientious member of the family. During the frequent fiery rows between her sisters, people would call for an intermission: ‘stay, send for Caroline, and then we shall know the truth’.
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Anne, Amelia and Caroline’s brother Frederick still remained in Hanover as the family’s representative in the German part of their dominions. Their three younger siblings – William Augustus, five, Mary, two, and Louisa, eighteen months – remained with their mother at Leicester House. Through daily contact these younger children won a warm place in their parents’ hearts, hearts that the absent children would never quite recapture.
For centuries royal children had been parted from their parents for their education and their health. Yet the eighteenth century
saw the rise of a new, more compact, more affectionate family unit; parents and children were starting to spend more time together. This rise of bourgeois family values applied even to royalty, and kings all over Europe began to think of themselves as the figureheads of close-knit families as well as of nations.
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Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline actively wanted to be parents to their elder children, as their concerned letters show, but they were thwarted at every turn. They wanted a family life according to modern, more loving, notions, but it was beyond their reach.
Despite the care that their grandfather the king took of them, the three older girls also suffered badly from their enforced separation from their parents. On one occasion ‘the poor little things’ sent a basket of cherries to their father, ‘with a message that though they were not allowed to go to him, their hearts, souls and thoughts were with their dear parents always’.
38
They were allowed to see the prince and princess only once a week, and not surprisingly they were often rude to their governess, Lady Portland. Amelia wrote of a certain ‘ugly
gouvernante
who hastes you always to come away, from people that love your company’.
39
Once, the girls were to be moved from Kensington to Windsor Castle, but as usual there was ‘a sort of bustle about it’. When Lady Portland asked Princess Anne to tell her parents about the plan, she flatly refused on the grounds that ‘if she was in their places she should not like to have her child carried about without her consent’.
40
So Lady Portland had to break the unwelcome news herself.
Amelia pined for her parents even more than her sisters. Precocious, intelligent but lacking guidance, she claimed to be ‘mightily tir’d of [her] self’, and was becoming spiky and difficult in a way that would harm her chances of marriage.
41
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The girls’ daily timetable as semi-prisoners in their grandfather’s palace at Kensington was monotonous: they rose at seven, prayed, dressed and breakfasted. They walked between eight and nine
beneath the noses of the ‘guards & sentinels’ placed around the palace gardens.
42
They read to themselves between nine and ten, read aloud between ten and eleven, and then it was time to ‘learn by heart’ until twelve. An hour of prayer was followed by an hour for dinner, and then an hour playing shuttlecocks, an hour of needlework and an hour practising the clavichord or performing with their music teacher, George Frederic Handel.
43
Handel also taught the king’s three illegitimate daughters. They too lived at Kensington Palace with their mother, Melusine.
But the princesses’ lives at Kensington were not entirely unpleasant. They had balls, with ‘all the garden illuminated and music in it and dancing in the Green House and the long Gallery’.
44
And they clearly enjoyed their grandfather’s annual birthday celebrations: fine fireworks were fired at ten, and ‘the little Princesses danced till 11’.
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The girls were certainly not kept short of clothes either. An account by their mother’s Mistress of the Robes records that every winter they each had:
Two coats embroider’d
[1] trim’d or rich stuff
1 velvet or rich silk without.
3 coats brocaded or damask
A damask night gown
Two silk under petticoats trim’d with gold or silver.
Their summer clothes, issued annually, consisted of:
3 flower’d coats one of them with silver.
3 plain or stripped [lustrous silk dresses]
1 night gown four silk hoops
46
In addition to their clothes, the girls had a new pair of shoes
every week
, sixteen dozen pairs of gloves a year and plentiful supplies of ‘powder, patches, combs, pins, May dew, quilted caps, band boxes, wax, pens and paper’. Their other expenses included the tuning of their harpsichord and food for their birds. Each princess had a personal staff of five, including a Page of Honour, a
Gentleman Usher, a Dresser, a Chambermaid and a Page of the Back-stairs. There was only one thing lacking from all this luxury: they had ‘no certain allowance for ribbons or artificial flowers’.
47
Lady Portland can’t have had an easy time of it, looking after three hostile princesses and thereby earning the lasting enmity of their parents. The Prince and Princess of Wales nursed ‘a most irreconcilable hatred’ towards the woman who saw their daughters more than they did.
48
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At Kensington Palace the little princesses lived around an old courtyard recently rebuilt and renamed ‘Princesses’ Court’ for its new occupants. From it a ‘colonnade of communication’ led to Melusine’s lodgings, and it must often have been used by the king making his frequent visits to his own, strange, self-selected and entirely female family: his legitimate granddaughters, his illegitimate daughters and his mistress.
49
Melusine von der Schulenberg had by now been rewarded for her services as the king’s mistress with the titles of Duchess of Kendal and of Munster. She had a three-storey apartment overlooking the gardens, and George I would visit her there ‘every afternoon from five till eight’.
50
Melusine enjoyed a special allowance of yellow wax candles to light the stairs leading to the room in her apartment where ‘his Majesty sups’.
51
Ambassadors guessed that during these evening visits she attempted ‘to penetrate the sentiments of his Britannic Majesty’ at Sir Robert Walpole’s request. But Melusine was not tied to Walpole, and her influence with the king could be bought for money by the highest bidder. The French ambassador assured his own king that in diplomatic business ‘it will be necessary to employ her, though I will not trust her further than is absolutely necessary’.
52
Meanwhile, Sophia Charlotte, the king’s half-sister, had died in 1725. Although she was perhaps the most intellectually curious and cultured member of George I’s inner circle, she was underestimated to the last by the xenophobic British. Until her death, she’d held a weekly supper for her half-brother the king to which
writers and wits were invited, occasions that have been overlooked when people describe George I as incurious and unintelligent.
53
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When he visited his family, the king had both ostentatious and discreet ways of getting around the palace. On the grand, public staircases, he always appeared with attendants: a Vice-Chamberlain holding up a candle to light the way, equerries like Peter Wentworth following on behind.
On other occasions he would cut conveniently through the behind-the-scenes areas and labyrinthine passages that were used by the palace’s scurrying servants. The narrow ‘back-stairs’ to his private apartments were useful for making a discreet exit. The royal chamber pot descended down this secret staircase, and the king’s most intimate visitors were brought up it when they came to visit him. Using the back-stairs circumvented the pomp, publicity and many watchful eyes ever present on the King’s Grand Staircase. The enduring phrase ‘back-stairs gossip’, signifying insider information, was born in this part of the palace.
As time went by, more and more of the courtiers considered themselves to be entitled to the privilege of using the back-stairs. The result was that the little staircase became positively crowded, with constant ‘contriving, undermining and caballing at the backstairs, the great ones hurrying back and forward, and the little ones cringing after’.
54
One experienced diplomat thought that multitudes using the British back-stairs showed a shoddy lack of management: ‘I have lived in four courts, and this is the first where I have ever seen anybody to go up the back stairs unless such as the Prince would have come to him unobserved.’
55
Anyone trying to get up to the king’s private chambers via the back-stairs would find one of the pages keeping guard. These gatekeepers to the king wielded enormous power, all the more so since Charles II had in the previous century delegated much control to one particular page. William Chiffinch, this favoured servant, became ‘a man of so absolute authority’ that even government ministers obeyed his commands.
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Some people,
knowing that his duties included bringing in women for the king, called him the ‘Pimpmaster General’.
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Eventually, Chiffinch’s unofficial power was acknowledged with an official title: the first among the pages became known as the ‘Keeper of the King’s Closet’. Exactly the same title was given to his successor, Mohammed, George I’s chosen gatekeeper. That’s why such a lubricious mythology grew up around the Turk. It was claimed that he too smuggled people in to fulfil the king’s bizarre and excessive sexual desires, or even that he fulfilled them himself. But no evidence exists for this beyond salacious rumour.