Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
Yet another spoof letter written as a court joke pretended an unlikely total disinterest in another, minor, rivalry with a visiting Frenchwoman:
For court intrigues I ne’er enquire
Nor who blows oftenest George’s Fire,
Valmot or Deloraine.
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And there were certainly heady moments, immediately after Caroline’s death, when Mary Deloraine – ‘that pretty idiot’ – was clearly the first mistress, despite her having ‘the silliest head, and the most vicious heart that ever were created’.
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Her former charges the princesses were very much chagrined by this turn of events. They did their best to oust their governess from pole position, trying ‘to divert their father’s melancholy by bringing women about him, and in scarce covert terms persuaded them to bawd for him’.
In his usual brutal way, Walpole advised the princesses to let Mary Deloraine reign supreme for the time being, as ‘people must wear old gloves till they could get new ones’.
So George II, after Caroline’s death, and in Amalie’s absence, sent ‘for this old acquaintance to his apartment from just the same motives that people send casually for a new one to a tavern’.
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With all this high-profile coming and going of mistresses, it was no wonder that a pamphleteer could indulge in the ‘melancholy reflection’ that ‘infidelities are much more frequent among people of elevated rank, than those of less exalted station’.
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By 1742, though, Mary Deloraine was on a downward trajectory, and deserved more than a little pity.
Her entire court career had been defined by her marriages and her role as mistress. Unlike Henrietta before her, though, she seemed to lack both the inner stability that led to social success and the ability to see that success for the shallow thing it was. Mary was beginning to feel that she’d failed.
She was not satisfied to be thought of as a mere interim mistress, and the arrival of Amalie von Wallmoden – a more wholehearted passion of the king’s – made her own slice of his attention seem remarkably meagre. So she talked it up. As Horace Walpole put it, ‘this thing of convenience, on the arrival of [Amalie], put on all that dignity of passion’.
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On the night of the conclusive conflict in the drawing room at Kensington Palace, the vulnerable and slightly jaded countess was
just about to turn forty. Mary was also putting on weight. In another discomforting drawing-room incident, she had been complaining about the food at court to a gentleman, who responded that it would do her good to have a minimal meal for a change. The demeaning result was that ‘she cried, and the Princesses, who were near, were very much diverted, and laughed mightily’.
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Under the circumstances, the courtiers would be well advised to back Amalie von Wallmoden rather than Mary Deloraine. John Hervey stood corrected when he made the mistake of assuming otherwise. On being told that the king had bought some lottery tickets for ‘his favourite’, he’d said he supposed that Mary was the recipient.
‘No, I mean the Hanover woman,’ Sir Robert Walpole put him right. ‘He does not go so deep to his lying fool here.’
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But maybe Mary could a produce surprise comeback. Unlike the passive Amalie, she certainly had plenty of courage, both natural and Dutch.
And the courtiers knew better than to express surprise at ‘any sudden change of favour’. They’d all seen those ‘who lean’d against the throne yesterday, beneath the footstool today’.
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What did Amalie and Mary hope to win in this battle of the mistresses? Was their dispute just a storm in a drawing-room tea cup, something unworthy of our attention?
While the subjects of court disputes often seem unbearably trivial to our eyes, eighteenth-century Britain was fascinated by titbits of gossip about who was in and who was out. The more sophisticated might justify themselves by claiming that this was ‘not so much for the sake of the royal favour in itself, as for the value which the foolish … set upon it’.
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So contemporaries did indeed think it well worth following the squalls among the mistresses, and women in the early Georgian court could potentially play a very powerful role.
People tended to make a lot of false assumptions about what
the job of royal mistress actually involved. It did not necessarily result in vast wealth, as Henrietta Howard’s experience had shown. Nor was it merely a physical role: a patient listening ear was at least as important to George II. What a mistress could hope to win (although Henrietta had also failed in this area) was a measure of influence over people and events. The other chances for eighteenth-century women to gain these things, except through a good marriage, were very limited indeed.
The status of the female sex was still not high: Lord Chesterfield agreed with Dryden that women ‘are only children of larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it’.
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(Molly Hervey characteristically subverted this aphorism to claim that both women
and men too
were merely ‘children of larger growth’.
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)
Despite his denigration of women, Chesterfield went straight on to claim that they could be hugely influential in palace life:
They have, from the weakness of men, more or less influence in all Courts … It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to manage, please, and flatter them; and never to discover the least marks of contempt, which is what they never forgive … Remember, therefore, most carefully to conceal your contempt, however just, where you would not make an implacable enemy.
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The Duchess of Marlborough was also ambivalent about the role of females at court, considering that ‘women signify nothing, unless they are the mistress of a Prince’.
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And Amalie and Mary had other role models to emulate beyond the retiring, honest and surprisingly un-mistress-like Henrietta. Like any intimate of the king’s, a mistress could win the power that was expressed through pensions, peerages or the patronage of posts. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu painted a fantastical, barbed picture of George I’s earlier court as a royal menagerie, the king ‘surrounded by all his German ministers and playfellows male and female’, while politicians on the make won a ‘share in the King’s councils by bribing his women’.
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Chief among
them had been Melusine, George I’s partner-in-life but never his queen (although some people claimed he had married her unofficially, ‘with the left hand’).
She, the former ‘May Pole’, was still just about alive as her successors jostled for position in 1742. The courtiers admitted that in Melusine’s heyday, ‘her interest did everything’ and that she had been ‘in effect, as much Queen of England as ever any was’.
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She was now living a leisured life of retirement at Kendal House, her villa by the Thames at Isleworth.
Two of her three daughters had made prestigious marriages: one to Lord Chesterfield, the other to a German count. Melusine’s children were still referred to as her nieces, though in fact everyone knew that she was their mother and George I had been their father.
Melusine’s long-held and semi-respectable role as George I’s unofficial consort had even won her admiration and affection from his son and daughter-in-law, and after George I’s death she’d been allowed to mourn like a wife. ‘My first thought, my dear Duchess,’ Caroline had written to her at the time, ‘has been of you … I know well your devotion and love for the late King … I hope you realise that I am your friend.’
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And Melusine seems to have grieved quite genuinely. George I had promised her that he’d return to her even ‘after his death’, and Horace Walpole recounted the visits of a black raven to the household at Isleworth. Melusine believed that this ‘was the soul of her departed monarch’ and intended to treat it tenderly ‘till the royal bird or she took their last flight’.
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In October 1742, that last flight was not long away, for she had only six months left to live.
This strange suburban afterlife was becoming quite normal for retired mistresses. Isleworth was not far from Twickenham, where Henrietta (now Berkeley) was also living in her own riverside villa. An early drawing-room occasion during George I’s reign had witnessed a remarkable gathering of three more apparently respectable old ladies: Lady Dorchester, formerly mistress of James II; the Duchess of Portsmouth, retired mistress of Charles
II; and Lady Orkney, once mistress of William III. ‘God! who would have thought that we three royal whores should meet here!’ quipped the latter.
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But obviously these formidable females were not just bimbos, and together they brought to the court an impressive platoon of wit and experience.
George I and George II both liked to pass the hours in their mistresses’ apartments quietly having supper and reflecting on events, and this provided necessary relief from the constant harassment that they endured at work. ‘I may well look ill,’ George I once said, ‘for I have had a world of blood drawn from me today.’
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Fifty people seeking an audience daily, with their fifty separate requests for a favour, were hard to bear. The mistress provided some much-needed royal down time and discussion time. However much their power was debated and despised, they deserved at least some of it for the arduous claims their job made on their skills.
Their role and influence in later courts would be much reduced, not least because of the bourgeois sensibilities of George III. George II’s grandson and successor was wary of what he perceived to have been the malign influence of the women at his grandfather’s court. He wrote that princes fallen into female hands ‘make miserable figures’. His grandfather’s lifestyle, he thought, was proof of this.
George III preferred women in a more domestic role, as mothers and submissive daughters. His rejection of women like Melusine and Henrietta, Mary and Amalie, as political advisors and entertainers would be a bland and boring triumph of respectability over female firepower.
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The two contestants for the title of chief mistress in 1742 were fighting over a man well past his prime.
George II, now aged fifty-nine, suffered from angina. After meals, he ‘always took off his cloaths, and reposed himself for an hour in bed’, and Sir Robert Walpole would come in for a chat.
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When dressed, the king’s aging figure remained imposing: at a wedding he wore gold with diamond buttons on his coat; in mourning, he appeared in purple with knots of black crape and a silver waistcoat.
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However, he did begin to be concerned in his advancing years that ‘a very handsome suit’ he had ordered should not ‘make a boy or a fop of him’.
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By now the king’s habits, character, capacity – and to some extent his reputation – were fully formed and firmly fixed.
A picture of this rather comical, red-faced, apoplectic figure, with Sir Robert Walpole kneeling by his bedside, was painted in the numerous and slightly jeering contemporary assessments of his reign. There was certainly something of a sense, by the mid-eighteenth century, that the monarchy was just another branch of London’s tourist industry. The city’s ‘fine sights’, said the satirists, included ‘the tombs, the lions, the king, the royal family, the fine plays and operas’.
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Some might have said that the prize for which Amalie and Mary were playing, staking their bodies and futures on the outcome, was not worth the candle.
The wily old Walpole’s opinion of George II – and he had many opportunities of forming it – was that the king lacked political courage. ‘He thinks he is devilish stout,’ the minister used to say, but in truth he was ‘as great a political coward as ever wore a crown, and as much afraid to lose it’.
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Walpole created a lasting image: George II as a king who always gave in to his politicians’ demands, albeit reluctantly and with bad grace.
‘I want very much to know’, wrote Molly Hervey, ‘what he can think (if he thinks at all) of those people who call themselves his friends, and are his servants.’
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In the privacy of his closet, George II certainly grumped and groaned his way through his daily audiences with his ministers. ‘Now I see, I am to be
wheedled
, sometimes
forced
… to bring about, what you want,’ he complained to them. ‘I see it very plainly, I am nothing, & wish to be gone.’
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When his ministers urged him to come back from his lengthy holidays in Hanover, he
would moan that there were already ‘Kings enough in England. I am nothing there. I am old and want rest, and should go only to be plagued and teased there about that damned House of Commons.’
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