Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (25 page)

George II was at first almost overwhelmed by his new responsibilities as king. A popular anecdote has it that the announcement of his father’s death literally caught him napping and only half-dressed, ‘with his breeches in his hand’ and reluctant to give a hearing to the messenger who brought the news.
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His first Parliament was similarly farcical, as one person present noted: ‘I saw him make [his opening speech] today, I can’t say heard, for his majesty was in so much confusion he could not put out his voice to be heard.’ Likewise, with ‘his crown he seemed a little awkward being ye first time of wearing it’.
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But George II’s reign got off to a much more secure start than his father’s. Even the Jacobites admitted that the new king, although ‘passionate, proud and peevish’, made a reasonably good first impression. His declared intention of ‘turning off the Germans’, for example, went down very well.
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At his coronation, Handel’s superlative musical setting for the ancient coronation text
Zadok the Priest
surged through Westminster Abbey for the first time; in following centuries it would become inextricably
associated with the ceremony of crowning. ‘I shall never forget the joy that swell’d my heart,’ wrote one witness present.
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Another of the memorable sights seen by the coronation’s hordes of spectators was the Countess of Orkney, the retired mistress of William III, exposing ‘behind a mixture of fat and wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of boobies a good deal withered’, along with ‘a great belly’.
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Henrietta was there too, in Queen Caroline’s train, making one of the ‘finest figures of all the procession’ in her scarlet and silver gown.
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The coronation feast took place in Westminster Hall, where William Kent had designed a festive triumphal arch. It was topped by statues of the new king and queen looking down upon the immense banquet spread below.

Kent would enjoy magnificent patronage from Britain’s new rulers. Over time he became almost constantly ‘called on for draughts’ or designs, both at court and ‘amongst people of quality’. In 1728, George II made Kent his official history painter and ‘keeper or preserver of the paintings of the royal palaces for life’.
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George II and Caroline enjoyed joining Kent ‘upon the scaffold’ to see him at work in this new capacity. Once they even climbed up to the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall to inspect his ongoing restoration of its paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. Kent’s own record of the occasion shows the contrasting gruffness of the king and the queen’s elegant eloquence: ‘his Majesty was pleas’d to tell me I had done them exceeding well’, while ‘the Queen told me I not only deserv’d thanks from the King’, but from ‘all lovers of painting’.
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Kent’s success continued to infuriate Sir James Thornhill. The older artist had long ago paid for his presumption in setting himself up as an architect and for his insolence towards the Board of the Office of the King’s Works. In the matter of the decoration of Kensington Palace he had managed to blend all parties ‘against him in all his affairs’. As a consequence he had fallen so far from
fashion, and so suddenly, that he had ‘long been unemployed’ by 1734.
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It would be the year in which he died.

With his customary versatility, Kent also designed much-praised costumes for court masquerades:Tudor huntsmen in green, for example, with bows and arrows and ‘caps and feathers upon their heads’.
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In 1733, working as an architect, he’d completed a splendid new ‘Royal Mews’ for the king’s horses at Charing Cross. But the most important of his works were by now taking shape out in the garden, a new field of endeavour for him and one in which he would become the country’s undisputed master.

His most striking works so far had been a clutch of crazy and inventive grottoes, summerhouses and other structures for Caroline, to ornament the grounds of her summer residence at Richmond. Kent’s love was for ‘natural’ landscapes, a far cry from the rigid alleys and clipped hedges of the previous generation’s baroque gardens. His friends cast scorn upon those old ‘damned dull walks’, those ‘cold and insipid straight walks which would make the Signior sick’.
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In the same spirit, Caroline had the great formal baroque garden planted by Queen Anne at Kensington Palace uprooted and replaced with a rolling lawn.

‘The Signior’ much preferred planning gardens to palace politics. A spoof letter from one of his clients describes the simple pleasure to be found in masterminding the woodlands of a Norfolk estate, contrasting his and Kent’s joint enjoyment with the machinations of the court:

Sir Robert Walpole was by now well ensconced in power, and cordially hated by those who resented his iron grip over people and events. Now enormously fat, he was unkindly but memorably described as ‘the potent knight whose belly goes/At least a yard before his nose’.
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He was the leader of the Whig party, but this was still far from being a disciplined organisation with a defined membership. It was a relaxed coalition of politicians, generally opposed by the Tories with their more rural and conservative interests. Yet the Whigs clearly remained in the ascendant. The control they had over the disposal of offices allowed them to shower their loyal supporters with rich rewards. In the sometimes rather grubby elections of the early Georgian period, they had little difficulty in keeping the Tories out.

Disaffected Whigs harried and spat at their colleagues, though, while renegade Tories occasionally accepted Walpole’s blandished offices, and parliamentary politics were lively and passionate. Peter Wentworth was left stunned by Walpole’s eloquence in the House of Commons: ‘shou’d I attempt to repeat after him I shou’d spoil the jokes … I am angry at my unhappy memory that cannot retain them.’
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Sometimes those jealous of Henrietta’s position as official mistress attempted to wound her by accusing her of consorting with Tory politicians. Yet she cleverly parried these attacks, carefully cultivating an image of herself as delightful but dim, and entirely without influence. Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henrietta accepted that a woman should ‘conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness’.
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Many of Henrietta’s colleagues were openly confused by her mixture of sociability and apparent insignificance. ‘She possessed every accomplishment and good quality which were ever the lot of a woman,’ ponders one perplexed eighteenth-century historian, while at the same time recounting anecdotes that show Henrietta demonstrating her helplessness.
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She sometimes ostentatiously asked people ‘to procure a trifling’ favour for her at court, asking them to keep her name out of the matter and saying, ‘if it is known that I have applied, I have no chance of succeeding’.
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In fact, this pretence of powerlessness was a crafty strategy to maintain a low profile and stay safe.

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Immediately after the coronation in 1727, it was found to be impossible that ‘the Palace of St James’s should be ready soon enough’ for occupation.
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So king, queen and all their households went off to Kensington Palace instead. Henrietta arrived at what would now become her regular summer home.

George II and Caroline wasted no time in altering the arrangements for the education of their daughters at Kensington: their cruel governess Lady Portland was sacked, and was reported to be sadly ‘fallen away since her dismissal from Court’. Lady Deloraine, the former Maid of Honour Mary Howard, came back into the royal household as her replacement.
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Although George II and Caroline were now reunited with their elder daughters, family harmony was still strangely absent. It seems that the king thought the regained children had been somehow tainted by their time with his father; certainly he and they were no longer close.

For the next decade of George II’s reign – the 1730s – we have the flamboyant, gripping and voluminous account of his and Caroline’s lives as king and queen captured in the memoirs of John Hervey.

The most malicious, amusing and memorable spokesperson for the Georgian court, Hervey had a voice that was – and remains – simply unmistakable. He also looked increasingly odd. His golden, girlish good looks that had initially attracted Molly Lepell had decayed, and he was now a foppish, ill-ish man with bad teeth and sometimes a little too much make-up. ‘This world consists of men, women and Herveys,’Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously said.
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Hervey’s pen portrait of Caroline, his royal mistress and much-loved friend, has given her stellar status among the British queens. As a result of Hervey’s readability and wit, her reputation remains sky-high: a clever, loquacious woman, trapped by a trying husband and a frustrating job.

But John Hervey, her strongest advocate, can also be a treacherous guide to the court. His partiality for Caroline led him to caricature George II as an ignorant and insensitive boor in a crude, one-sided portrait which has dominated popular history.

John Hervey joked about his own cold and feline personality. He said his coat of arms should really be ‘a
cat
scratchant, with this motto: “For my friends where they itch; for my enemies where they are sore”’

 

To be fair, Hervey’s stated aim in writing his memoirs of the court was much more modest than that of being its official historian. It was merely to capture a scene, to titillate a little and to amuse. ‘I am determined to report everything just as it is, or at least just as it appears to me,’ he wrote, ‘and those who have a curiosity to see courts and courtiers dissected must bear with the dirt they find.’
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Although John Hervey is a brilliant sketch-writer, a cold and razor-sharp wit and an exaggerator of the ridiculous, the theatrical and the gothic aspects of the court, that doesn’t mean that we can’t believe him at all. At the heart of each of his brilliant word-pictures, with all their superfluous frills of absurdity, there probably lies a germ of truth. The events he describes really happened; the words were really spoken – though perhaps not in such a high-camp manner as he suggests.
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And Hervey was doubtless very close to the king and queen, and privy to their secrets. The summer of 1734 saw him:

Caroline called Hervey her ‘child, her pupil, and her charge’. She also used to tell him that she permitted ‘his being so impertinent and daring to contradict her so continually’ only because ‘she could not live without him’. ‘It is well I am so old,’ she often said, ‘or I should be talked about for this creature.’

Was this flighty butterfly of the court emotionally engaged by Caroline in return, or was he simply unable to resist fluttering near to the flame of power?

However unlikely it seemed in the wicked world of the court, the truth lay in the former. Hervey ‘really loved and admired’ the queen. He gave up all of his ‘time to her disposal’, at the cost of neglecting his beautiful wife.
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We left Molly pursuing intrigues of her own, but she had dutifully produced a whole string of Hervey heirs. Named for the king, her own George was born in 1721, followed by Augustus. Molly also had two daughters, Lepell and Mary. Frederick, her third son, born in 1730, was a puny infant, and his grandfather thought his weak physique had been caused by the pregnant Molly’s irresponsible fondness for ‘dancing, morning suppers, sharp wines, china oranges,&c’.
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Three more children would follow, making a total of eight. Yet Molly was distinctly unmaternal: ‘I mortally hate children and am uneasy when they are in the room.’
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