Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
John Hervey, seeing through the charade as usual, thought this all quite ridiculous: ‘squabbling and contesting with one another for trifles’.
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But while correct he was also foolishly naive, for by what else could the princesses judge their status and success? Marriages, babies, chairs not stools: these were the stuff of their circumscribed world. When the Irish peers were excluded from a court procession, Lord Egmont thought the consequences potentially cataclysmic for his spouse. ‘If this matter be decided against us,’ he protested, ‘I know not who will give our wives place or what they ought to insist on, in coming or going out of doors, at card tables, &c.’
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Despite all this attention to detail, the proceedings sometimes broke down into farce, and court dinners could be roisterous and rowdy. Once, so many people came ‘to see their majesties dine,
that the rail surrounding the table broke’. The people who’d been leaning upon it all fell over and ‘made a diverting scramble for hats and wigs, at which their Majesties laugh’d heartily’.
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There was even more of a scrum at coronation feasts. After George I’s, the newspapers carried pleas for the return of the silver ‘dishes, trencher-plates, knives, forks, spoons, and salts’ pinched by those present.
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At the end of George II’s own coronation banquet:
the big doors were thrown open and the crowd allowed to enter and take possession of the remains of the feast, of the table linen, of the plates and dishes, and of everything that was on the table. The pillage was most diverting; people threw themselves with extraordinary avidity on everything that hall contained; blows were given and returned, and I cannot give you any idea of the noise and confusion that reigned. In less than half an hour everything had disappeared, even the boards of which the table and seats had been made.
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The historian Jeremy Black evokes this riotous image to illustrate how, despite the supposed gentility and elegance of the Georgian age, it was really characterised by ‘unruliness just kept at bay’.
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Kensington Palace in 1734 was perhaps the liveliest it had ever been, with endless parties and pranks among Henrietta’s companions. At all courts, the amusements veered towards the improper: ‘blind man’s buff, till past three this morning; we have musick in the wood, parties out of town; besides the constant amusements of quadrille and scandal which flourish and abound’.
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The absent Molly Hervey wistfully recollected the japes of the Maids of Honour and their
beaux
: ‘I really believe a
frizelation
[court jargon for flirtation] wou’d be a surer means of restoring my spirits than the exercise and hartshorn I now make use of’.
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Henrietta’s Kensington Palace must have felt like the very centre of the world, because everybody who was anybody came to visit. Would-be guests had to send in their names to the Lord Chamberlain, then the Duke of Grafton.
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Familiarly known as
‘Booby Grafton’, the smooth-talking Charles Fitzroy, second duke, was an illegitimate grandson of Charles II. His colleagues thought him an excellent courtier, ‘beloved by all parties’, and ‘every court storm to which the climate is so subject broke at his feet’.
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He had long been in love with Princess Amelia, despite being old enough to be her father. As no handsome prince had stepped forward to claim Amelia (or her younger sisters), a flirtation with the safe and familiar Booby Grafton seemed the most attractive relationship open to her.
The right of entry through the hallowed door into the drawing room was codified by unwritten rules. The kernel of those granted entry included the more important members of the royal household, the courtiers proper. Many of them were peers of the realm holding specific posts, usually attending in rotation for part of the year only. Then there were the two hundred-odd families of the peerage in general, most of whom attended on occasion, if not regularly.
Ambassadors and members of foreign peerages would also find access easy. But there were no hard and fast rules, and the next rank down – lawyers, rich merchants, country gentlemen – might well be allowed in. Even a penniless law student, relying on the impression created by his ‘best clothes and lace ruffles’, once managed to slip through the door in the wake of a grander personage walking just ahead.
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According to custom, the drawing room was still opened to visitors several times a week ‘at ten o’clock at night’.
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Then the king and queen would make a dazzling appearance: sometimes Caroline’s ‘stomacher was prodigiously adorn’d with diamonds … as broad as a shilling’, while George II’s ‘coat was of blue velvet with diamond buttons’.
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Some of the guests came from elsewhere in Europe or from even further afield. The year 1729, for example, saw Handel and his cast of Italian opera stars perform at Kensington Palace before the king and queen.
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Sir Robert Walpole had kept Britain out of the costly European
War of the Polish Succession of 1733–4, hoping (in vain, as it happened) to become the arbiter of events once the European powers had exhausted themselves in combat. Nor did Walpole take much interest in Britain’s empire. Across the Atlantic, the colony of Georgia, named for the king, had just been founded. (This had annoyed the Spanish in nearby Florida, and would lead to future trouble.) One visitor to Kensington from North America was a novel and curious creature. The governor of New England sent Caroline ‘a young beaver alive’, the representative of a species that had been hunted to extinction in Britain a hundred years before. The beaver joined the other animals in the palace menagerie, but Caroline was warned to keep it ‘within stone walls, or iron bars, or to be chained, because it will eat through anything of wood’.
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The 3rd of August 1734 saw another remarkable sight at Kensington Palace: a party of chiefs from the Cherokee nation come to pay their respects to George II. Tomochichi, their king, led in ‘his two War-Captains’ and ‘three others, called Chiefs’. Their faces were ‘most hideously painted’ in ‘black and red, so thick that at a little distance they looked like masks’.
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Now William Kent’s Presence Chamber at the top of the King’s Grand Staircase came into use. Here George II sat upon his throne, which was actually an armchair covered with crimson velvet.
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The Cherokee chiefs ‘made their obeisances’, delivered an incomprehensible speech and presented the king with animal skins and ‘sticks with feathers on them, which are emblems of peace’.
After this forging of an alliance between the two nations, the Cherokees went through to the Gallery for an audience with Queen Caroline and all the ladies of the court. One of the chiefs ‘was asked which he thought the finest woman there’. He made a very diplomatic answer, ‘owning that all white people were so much alike to him, that he could not easily distinguish one from another’.
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So the kings of the New World came to pay homage to the king of the Old.
Every month or so, the evening drawing-room gathering was eclipsed by a splendid ball to celebrate one of the birthdays of the numerous royal children. Once again security was not particularly tight, and the resourceful law student also succeeded in infiltrating a court ball. He waited ‘among a vast crowd of nobility and gentry’ for the all-important ‘opening of the door’ to the dancing room. Then ‘we all rushed in as fast as we could go and got in among the rest and got into a pretty good place’.
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One Georgian letter-writer gives us a gorgeous glimpse of the corpulent Caroline being swept up and carried away by an eager crowd of dancing courtiers. Wanting to introduce her to a visitor named Sir Paul Methuen, the dancers burst ‘into the room, where the Queen was at play and danced round the table; upon which the Queen rose up, took Sir Paul by the hand, danced through all the rooms and so to the coach’.
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Peter Wentworth’s young and aristocratic nephew once enjoyed a high-spirited children’s birthday ball held for Caroline’s youngest son, William Augustus. Little Lord Wentworth was taken along to court by his mother, and Caroline welcomed him with her usual warmth: ‘the Queen cried out: “Oh! Lord Wentworth! How do you do? You have mightily grown! My lady, he is prodigiously well dressed. I hope you will let him come to our ball to night.”’
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So the young lord was dressed in his best, and Mr Morin the hairdresser sent for to do up his hair.
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The evening’s events, much anticipated, were slightly marred by an accident befalling the new governess, Mary Deloraine. The very same day she ‘fell in labour, and was just brought to bed of a dead son; so they could not have the room they used to dance in (it being next to hers)’. The young people enjoyed themselves nevertheless. Peter Wentworth’s nephew was asked to dance by the forthright Princess Amelia, and was enjoined to eat a supper of cold chicken, tongue, jelly and sweetmeats. But on this occasion, as his mother reported, ‘as well as my love loves eating, he says he ate but a leg of chicken, for he says he did not [think] it looked well to be pulling greasy bones about in a room full of princesses’.
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The year’s most important ball, for the king’s birthday at the end of October, was usually held back at St James’s Palace. It signalled everyone’s return to town after the summer. In 1734, an exceptionally magnificent entertainment marked the marriage of Caroline’s eldest daughter, Anne, the Princess Royal, to the hunchback Prince William of Orange. Now twenty-four, she’d become so desperate to marry and escape the monotony of palace life that she claimed she’d have accepted a proposal even from a baboon.
William Kent was given the job of decorating the chapel for the ceremony, and pulled strings to have Sir James Thornhill’s son-in-law, William Hogarth, banned from making potentially lucrative drawings of the wedding setting. Now that he was so snugly settled in the queen’s favour, Kent found himself easily able to swat aside annoyances such as the infringement of an old enemy upon court ground.
To sniggering bystanders it appeared that Hogarth now regretted those discourteous ‘caricatures’ with which he had previously poked fun at Kent and ‘which now he is like to pay for, when he least thought on it’.
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In the battle of the painters, Kent had finally had the last laugh.
*
What changes had kingship wrought upon the character of Henrietta’s ‘passionate, proud and peevish’ lover, George II? By 1734, his earlier willingness to please was wearing off. Disaffected courtier Lady Mary Wortley Montagu summed him up as ardent but overindulged. She thought that he viewed ‘all the men and women he saw as creatures he might kick or kiss for his diversion’.
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With the passage of time, George II had reverted to his German roots. ‘Whilst the late King lived everybody imagined this Prince loved England and hated Germany,’ it was said, but now his birthplace exerted more of a pull upon his affections. He could be heard complaining that no English cook ‘could dress a dinner; no English confectioner set out a dessert; no English
player could act; no English coachman could drive’. In Hanover, of course, ‘all these things were in the utmost perfection’.
Henrietta’s supposed lover frequently abandoned her to flee back to Hanover, and every three years or so he paid an extended visit of several months. Indeed, one of these absences was so prolonged that a mysterious paper was pasted up at the Royal Exchange, spoofing a court announcement: ‘it is reported that his Hanoverian Majesty designs to visit his British dominions for three months in the spring’.
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As he entered his fifties, George II had become a stickler for minor matters of protocol. ‘The least negligence, or the slightest inattention, reported to him, may do you infinite prejudice,’ one would-be courtier was warned. The king was ‘rigidly attached to etiquette’, and seemed ‘to think his having done a thing today, an answerable reason for his doing it to-morrow’.
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This turgid devotion to the same daily programme gradually ground his courtiers down into miserable, mind-numbing boredom. ‘I will not trouble you with any account of our occupations,’ John Hervey wrote in 1733, ‘no mill-horse ever went in a more constant track, or a more unchanging circle.’
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‘We go on as regular as ye clock,’ confirmed Lady Burlington, ‘we are now going on our evening’s walk; from hence to lottery & so on.’
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His ponderous dedication to routine meant that George II would not pay his daily visit to his mistress one minute before the accustomed time. He was used to arriving in Henrietta’s apartment at 7 o’clock exactly, and if he was early he would ‘walk up and down the gallery, looking at his watch, for a quarter of an hour’.
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Then he’d usually spend a couple of hours with Henrietta, but he did so more out of duty than desire. By now the courtiers were firmly convinced that the king had a mistress ‘rather as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince than an addition to his pleasures as a man’. He was overheard speaking to her in an ‘angry and impatient tone’, and replying to a mild question with ‘that is none of your business, madam; you have nothing to do with that!’
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