Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
The complex palace geography that Peter Wentworth and his colleagues found so familiar was difficult to learn, and journeys were inevitably hindered by the servants leaving upon the backstairs ‘a pail of dirty water with the mop in it, a coal-box, a bottle, a broom, a chamber-pot, and such other unsightly things’.
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One night, Wentworth witnessed an unusual bet between Princess Caroline and her courtier Lord Grantham about whether it was possible to reach a particular room without using the backstairs. ‘She bade him go and see,’ Wentworth wrote. When he came back unconvinced, the princess took charge:
‘Well’, says she, ‘will you go along with me if I show you the way?’ ‘Yes, madam,’ says he. Up she starts, and trots away with one candle, and came back triumphant over my Lord Grantham.
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Many of the courtiers thought that Lord Grantham was a nincompoop, possessing the ‘animal gift of reasoning in so small a proportion that his existence was barely distinguished from a vegetable’.
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To be fair to him, though, the back-stairs and passages were infernally complicated.
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The characters inhabiting the warren-like world ‘below stairs’ had more influence than their position might suggest. As Lord Chesterfield recognised, a slighted servant could ‘do you more hurt at court, than ten men of merit can do you good’.
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‘No man’,
as the adage has it, ‘is a hero to his valet,’ and John Hervey begged an indiscreet correspondent not to leave his letters in a coat pocket, where they would inevitably be read by the nosy manservant giving the coat a brush.
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Peter Wentworth had to accompany the king on horseback if he left the palace, so he often had business in the stable yard. Peter the Wild Boy, too, took ‘vast pleasure in conversation with horses’, and had two ‘intimate acquaintances in the king’s stable’.
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Making their daily way to the stables, Wentworth and the Wild Boy could take the temperature of the nether regions of the palace. The voices heard below stairs were doubtless different from those of the drawing room: perhaps rougher, perhaps warmer; maybe less articulate, maybe more direct. Lord Chesterfield considered that ‘common people, footmen and maidservants, all speak ill. They make use of low and vulgar expressions, which people of rank never use.’
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In appearance, though, the superior servants were sometimes indistinguishable from their betters. Swept up in the eighteenth-century craze for fashion, an aristocrat might well have met ‘a puppy at an assembly, perhaps who gets
£
50 or
£
60 a year, dress’d in his bag [i.e. his wig] and sword and the next morning you’ll see him sweeping his master’s doorway’.
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He would also ape his master’s arrogance: ‘the servants of a great man are all great men. Wou’d you get within their doors, you must bow to the porter.’
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In the palace the only really clear visual distinction was between those who wore the lower household’s livery and those who didn’t. ‘If she is Mrs with a surname, she is above the livery and belongs to the upper servants,’ explained a correspondent of Henrietta Howard’s, ‘but if she be Mrs only with her Christian name, as Mrs Betty, Mrs May, Mrs Dolly,’ then she will ‘look as low’ as anybody.
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One of the most important female servants at Kensington Palace was Mrs Jane Keen. In 1723, she purchased the reversion of the post of housekeeper against the time when the present incumbent, Henry Lowman, might die, and over the years she would
become the motor that kept the palace running.
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Princess Amelia poked fun at the Earl of Hardwicke for bowing just as low to Mrs Keen as he did to the king.
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The world below stairs could be rowdy, full of running feet and fists ready to throw a punch, while unsavoury characters lurked in its corners. Wentworth records the scuffle to get ready when the king ‘took us at a surprise’ by calling for his carriage with only an inadequate forty-five minutes’ notice.
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Then there were complaints that ‘idle persons’, ‘vagrants & beggars’ were ‘commonly seen within the King’s palace’.
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A royal wedding was marred by ‘bad company’ and ‘scrub people’, and no wonder, for footmen were seen in the coffee houses beforehand, selling the tickets intended for peers ‘to any who would purchase them for three shillings’.
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On one occasion Wentworth won ‘immortal fame among the liverymen’ for speaking up for a palace groom who’d beaten up a carter (‘a very saucy fellow’) obstructing the way of the royal coach.
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More seriously, Princess Caroline had to sack one of her sedan chairmen because he was ‘strongly suspected of having too good an understanding with some highwaymen’.
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The bodies of condemned highwaymen and other felons were displayed at Tyburn Gallows, only a mile or so from Kensington Palace.
A kind of committee called ‘the Board of the Green Cloth’ was the mechanism for regulating these menial and sometimes troublesome reaches of the royal household. Its officers took their name from an actual table or ‘board’, covered with a green cloth, around which their predecessors had met since the reign of King Edward IV. Piles of tokens pushed across the table stood for provisions in and out.
The provisioning, cleaning and security of the palace was the responsibility of the Lord Steward, one of the great officers of the realm. He, along with the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Master and the Cofferer of the household, plus clerks, made up the Board of the Green Cloth. Together they ran the entire below-stairs department, making contracts with suppliers and paying the bills.
And, importantly, the Board maintained discipline. It had
judicial responsibility for all offences committed in or near the court. Before the Board appeared disobedient servants, pickpockets, prostitutes and the unruly scrum of chairmen touting for business and overcrowding the palace courtyards.
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Although he had a jester’s traditional freedom of speech, the court comedian Ulrich Jorry’s wayward attitude managed to land him in serious trouble from time to time. On one notorious occasion he complained to the Board of the Green Cloth that he’d been abused and attacked by two footmen ‘belonging to the Countess of Portland’ (governess to the little princesses).
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Court gossip, however, revealed that Ulrich had deserved his beating. He’d tried to kiss a certain ‘damsel’ or maid who worked for Lady Portland. The damsel’s lover, a Welsh footman, had given Ulrich a punch in punishment. When the affair reached the king’s ear, though, ‘some of the biggest people at court’ supported Ulrich’s cause. This resulted in the footman being made prisoner in the palace guard room ‘by His Majesty’s particular direction’.
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Although Ulrich Jorry’s attacker had been locked up, Ulrich appeared again before the Board of the Green Cloth the following day to make further accusations. Now he was pushing his luck, ‘arraigning the justice of their proceedings’ and ‘behaving himself very insolent’.
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So Ulrich was threatened with imprisonment himself, for contempt of the Board, and he was taken off to the ‘Porters Lodge’. But it looked like he would be able to use his charm to escape punishment, by ‘begging pardon and acknowledging his fault’.
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Once again, however, the king came to hear of the matter, and this time he was disinclined to be lenient. George I ordered that Ulrich must be ‘taken into custody by the guards’ and put ‘into the hole at Kensington’ for a fortnight on a diet of bread and water.
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In the event, this imprisonment only lasted twenty-four hours before there was a relaxation and Ulrich was released. Presumably he emerged having learnt that even favourites are not always above the palace rules.
There was a continual tension between the Lord Steward’s courtiers
department (supervised by the Board of the Green Cloth) and the servants employed in the ‘above-stairs’ part of the palace, which was controlled by the Lord Chamberlain. The Lord Chamberlain’s servants griped about the poor food provided by the Lord Steward’s department: so little meat that they ‘had much ado to make a dinner’. They also complained that the Lord Steward’s men were so mean with candles that the courtiers ran ‘their noses against the hangings’ in the dark. ‘Do not suffer us to be governed by the Board of Greencloth!’ was a frequent cry to be heard among the Lord Chamberlain’s servants.
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But this slapstick, knockabout type of conflict could become more serious, especially for the female employees. Punishments could be exceptionally harsh for servants caught stealing from the royal palaces. In 1731, servant Sarah Matts was put in prison for ‘feloniously stealing a quilt’ out of a palace guard room.
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While incarcerated, she brought an accusation of rape against a guard. With heart-rending circumstantial detail, she reported how he ‘thump’d me’ and ‘then he flung me a-cross the bed, so as my head hung down, and he tore my legs asunder … I scream’d, and cry’d out, Murder; but he would lie with me.’
A character witness who appeared in support of Sarah’s assailant said that she was a prostitute, just ‘a common vile woman’ who deserved no better. He announced that she’d previously been seen ‘in bed with a man, in the guard-room, at St. James’s’, and that ‘the greatest black-guard may lie with her’ for sixpence.
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It comes as no surprise, given the blackening of her character, that her attacker was found innocent and poor Sarah was subjected to a whipping.
Matters took an even worse turn for one Catherine Pollard, employed for thirty years in the silver scullery at Kensington Palace. She was accused of stealing four silver plates and selling them to a dealer who performed the treasonable action of filing off the royal arms. He, however, escaped punishment by giving evidence against Catherine herself, while she was tried for a capital felony at the Old Bailey.
The plea she made in her own defence was pitifully inadequate: ‘I believe there was a spell set upon me, or else I was bewitch’d.’
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She was condemned to death.
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The court was constantly changing. In October of 1726, George I’s trusty aide Mohammed fell ill. He had suffered from dropsy in the summer and sought to cure it with the waters of Bath. In the autumn it returned, and between ‘thirteen and fourteen quarts’ of fluid were drawn from his swollen body.
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Two days later, on 1 November, he gave up the unequal fight.
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He died, as he’d lived, at Kensington Palace.
Mohammed was widely mourned as a good man. His reputation for kindness and generosity was enhanced by his will, which included the instruction to spend money from his estate upon releasing three hundred debtors from prison. ‘Forty years attendance upon COURTS,’ it was said, ‘those nurseries of flattery and deceit, made not the least impression upon him.’ He also decreed that his children should inherit his property in Hanover, including ‘tapestries, beds, chairs, tables, looking-glasses, pictures’.
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His widow became very interested in the fate of a wallet containing 1,500 ducats, which she thought her husband had mislaid in the king’s closet, but her quest for its restitution ended fruitlessly.
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Mohammed’s duties – paying for the king’s hats, suits and wigs, meeting the bills for theatre subscriptions, looking after the king’s precious objects – were taken over by Mustapha, but there were only months to go before the death of the master they had both served for forty years.
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George I had felt a premonition of death in the same month that Mohammed passed away. His long-estranged wife, still confined in her faraway prison-castle at Ahlden, finally died after thirty-three years incarcerated. George I’s reaction was to place the briefest of notices in the
London Gazette
, countermand the mourning dress that the court in Hanover had adopted, and to go to the theatre.
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Nor would he allow his son Prince George
Augustus to wear mourning dress for the woman who was, after all, his mother.
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There was much whispered hearsay in London about a ‘French prophetess’ who’d predicted that George I himself would not long outlive his wife.
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On 20 December 1726, George I departed from Kensington Palace after what would prove to be his last extended residence there. Early in 1727, he returned to the palace for a brief tour with the housekeeper Henry Lowman. Ironically, it was during this final visit to the palace that George I looked forward to the completion of the project. William Kent’s finished Grand Staircase ‘pleased him much’, and the king was happy to hear that the scaffolding would be taken down the following Monday.
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