Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
She’d also become known as the person to visit, cash in hand, if you wanted a peerage, ‘including among her customers, the grandson of a footman and the son of a Barbados pedlar’.
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She certainly wasn’t cheap: it was said that she had ‘touched twelve thousand’ for one particular coronet, and ‘sixteen thousand pounds’ for a viscountcy.
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Horace Walpole thought that she was obsessed with ‘selling peerages whenever she had an opportunity’, although, having had to put up with so much bad temper over so many years, she did deserve some financial compensation.
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Meanwhile, George II and Caroline’s daughters the princesses had undergone many vicissitudes. The pock-marked and harpsichord-loving Princess Anne had been so desperate to get married that she’d accepted the horrifically ugly Prince William of Orange. But her new life in the Netherlands was miserable and she took every opportunity to come running back to her parents.
Her father gave her only a cold welcome. George II thought
that having made her marital bed she must lie in it. Anne also struggled to have babies: it was nearly ten years before she produced the requisite son and heir for Prince William. She outlived her husband but failed to reverse the steady decline of his state. On 12 January 1759, her death (from dropsy) took place in The Hague. She’d been fifty years old, far from the land of her birth and missed by few.
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Anne’s younger sister Princess Louisa had been packed off to marry the king of Denmark. She’d died in the same year as her brother Frederick, after a bungled operation just like her mother’s. Louisa’s first pregnancy had given her ‘a slight rupture which she concealed’, and ‘her death … was terrible’.
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In 1737, when Queen Caroline had died, her modest, mild and favourite daughter Princess Caroline had suffered a nervous breakdown. The younger Caroline had confidently expected to follow her mother to the grave, but somehow she managed to limp on through life, in poor health, for another twenty years. She lived as a recluse, shut up ‘in two chambers in the inner part of St James’s’, all other possibilities ‘now dead to her’.
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Here she received no visitors except close family and John Hervey, for whom she had cherished a long-lived but hopeless passion.
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She finally died in 1757.
At seventeen Princess Mary had been married off to the hereditary Prince of Hesse-Cassel, but found her husband ‘a brutal German, obstinate, of no genius’.
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He treated her with ‘the greatest inhumanity’ until they parted in 1755. His conversion to Catholicism gave Mary the excuse she needed to leave. Her sister Princess Amelia remarked with relief that it was for Mary the final ‘fifth Act of the Tragedy, which will make it soon over’.
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After a recuperative spell in England, Mary returned to Hesse-Cassel to look after the interests of her sons.
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Princess Amelia was by 1760 the only child to remain with her father. No prince had ever emerged as a possible husband for her, and marriage to a commoner was unthinkable. She had lost her old squire, ‘Booby’ Grafton, the former Lord Chamberlain, to a
fatal hunting fall in 1757.
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Still outspoken, still well-informed, it was unfortunate that Amelia clashed with her father’s favourite, the meeker, more malleable Amalie Yarmouth. Her talents were wasted in her role as an aging spinster princess, though she constantly shocked her prudent sister-in-law, Princess Augusta, with ‘highly improper’ but successful spells at the gaming table during trips to Bath.
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Princess Amelia’s friends thought that she ‘knew more of the world than princes usually do; partly from native sagacity, partly from keeping better company and having a mind above that jealous fear of the superior in understanding’.
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While the sparks still sometimes flew at Kensington, George II had recently begun to give Princess Amelia more of the appreciation that she deserved. He could not help noticing that she was now the only one left of his and Caroline’s eight merry children: Mary was gone back abroad; her brother William Augustus was hostile; the rest were dead.
While the king had always had mistresses, and while politics had complicated his relationships with his children, he had always really wished to place his family first.
Yet, by 1760, a succession of desperately unfortunate quarrels and accidents had seen his family fizzle away. As a child, George II had lost his own mother when she was imprisoned for adultery. Then he lost contact with his eldest son through the move to Britain in 1714. Next he effectively lost his own father through the quarrel that also saw his three eldest daughters taken from him. His second son was snatched and died in George I’s care, cementing the enmity between them. After a few short years of peaceful life with what was left of his family, George II lost his richly, truly, deeply beloved Caroline. His grandchildren were turned against him, and he lost his eldest son to a premature death. Death took three more daughters, Louisa, Anne and Caroline, while an ill-considered, snarling slight saw his only remaining son sink into silent enmity.
Bearing in mind all these losses, it was no wonder that the king
was bitter, disappointed, enraged. The British Empire was no consolation, and ‘his eyes were now constantly full of tears’.
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Meanwhile, outside the court, Henrietta Berkeley’s beloved George had died, after a painfully brief eleven years of happy married life, on 29 October 1746.
She could not have failed to mourn him, and their surviving letters reveal how greatly they had loved each other. He’d used to beg her: ‘for my sake take more than usual care of yourself’, while she herself was accustomed to sign off with ‘God bless you … I do with all my heart and soul nor do I yet repent that I am H. Berkeley.’
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Bereft of George, Henrietta continued to live quietly at their country house at Marble Hill and their town house at 15 Savile Row. She amused herself by taking a kindly interest in young relatives. But her health was poor, and she must have regretted the years of her youth given to her first husband and to the king. Regret must have almost overwhelmed her when she thought about her only son, Henry, turned against her by his father and altogether lost to her, although he led a successful life and became a Member of Parliament.
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Down at Marble Hill, Henrietta passed the time entertaining her friend and neighbour Horace Walpole with stories of the court of old. Sir Robert Walpole’s son was described as ‘long and slender to excess; his complexion, and particularly his hands, of a most unhealthy paleness’. He had a very characteristic walk, in a ‘style of affected delicacy’, which made it look like he was ‘afraid of a wet floor’.
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An indefatigable collector of snippets of history from court dowagers, his letters and memoirs are an entertaining if inaccurate guide to the Georgian court of his youth. His favourite activity of an evening was to sit gossiping about old times with aged royal mistresses, namely Henrietta Berkeley or Amalie Yarmouth.
He found life in his house at Strawberry Hill, as Henrietta’s near neighbour, most satisfactory to his macabre taste: ‘dowagers as
plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight’.
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Henrietta brushed with the court one last time just before George II’s death, the occasion a final, chance encounter with her former lover. Her friend Horace reports how ‘oddly’ it happened. Two days before the king died, she went to make a visit to Kensington Palace. She didn’t know that one of the regular reviews of the troops was taking place in Hyde Park and ‘found herself hemmed in by coaches’ in the resultant road chaos. Here, stuck in the jammed traffic, Henrietta’s vehicle came close to the coach of the king, ‘whom she had not seen for so many years, and to my Lady Yarmouth’. She recognised them immediately.
But, despite their proximity, ‘they did not know her. It struck her.’
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George II may have erased her from his memory. Just as she’d promised, though, when she’d left court so long ago, Henrietta had never forgotten him.
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In the old days Henrietta had often heard George II saying that Kensington Palace’s reputation for dampness was undeserved. Certainly it didn’t affect him personally, because ‘incessant fires’ were kept blazing in his rooms to ensure that there was ‘no possibility of His Majesty’s catching cold’.
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He’d frequently boasted that he ‘would never die’ at Kensington.
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On 25 October 1760, he was to be proved wrong.
The events of George II’s last morning unfolded in the first-floor private apartments at Kensington Palace that overlooked the gardens to the south-east. The king’s simple bedroom contained his ‘small bed’ with its hair mattress, his single candle and a wicker basket standing on the table to hold his nightcap during the day.
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That Saturday morning, George II rose at six as usual. Schröder, his valet, later remarked that the king had ‘never looked better than when he gave him his chocolate at seven’.
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After drinking, the king ‘threw up his window and said it was a fine morning, he would go into the garden’.
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Horace Walpole’s diary contains the most entertaining account of what happened over the next few minutes, before the king had the chance to leave.
A little after seven he went into the water-closet – the German valet de chambre heard a noise, louder than the royal wind, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in, and found the hero of Oudenarde and Dettingen on the floor, with a gash on his right temple, by falling against the bureau.
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Walpole painted the scene with his customary relish for the bizarre. A less sensational account records Schröder’s small but painful dilemma: hearing an ‘unusual noise in the room’, he had to think very hard before he ‘ventured to open the door, which he had never done before’.
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There was the king, lying on the floor, his head hurt by his fall, obviously dying. His heart had given out at last. The valet lifted the king onto the bed. While Horace Walpole claimed that ‘he tried to speak, could not, and expired’, there were other, rival accounts that recorded a few final muttered words, and the last words of kings were always a matter of much moment.
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It has been said that the dying king called out for Amalie, his mistress, and certainly the noise he produced sounded like her name.
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This fact has been taken to confirm the king’s unpleasant nature: unfaithful to his wife to the last. (It is also certain that his faithful mistress Amalie would have fulfilled the bargain between them and been a steadfast companion to the very end.)
In fact, though, the king’s inability to speak clearly caused a good deal of confusion. It was his daughter, not his mistress, for whom he called.
Princess Amelia, known to the English as Princess Emily, was the child of a polyglot family. She signed her letters as ‘Amalie’, and so she was known by her father.
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The king wanted to die in the presence of the only person still living who’d been present at Caroline’s death.
So it was Princess Amelia who was summoned, though with
the misunderstanding there was too much delay. Because she was now a little deaf, she did not catch the servants’ muffled words and only discovered for herself that her father was dead when she touched his lifeless body laid out on the bed.
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And it was a terrible experience for her. Amelia had been forcibly parted from her father in her youth, and there is no doubt that she at times had cordially hated him, griping ‘Jesus! How tiresome he is!’; complaining about him; doing her best to avoid him.
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Unlike her seven siblings, though, she had also come to feel something like sympathy for him towards the end, and now found herself subject to strange emotions.
She was hurled ‘into an agony’ by her father’s death, ‘this shock so sudden, so unexpected, and so violent’.
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Now Amelia and Amalie were probably the only people who genuinely grieved for George II.
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So sudden was the king’s death that an investigation was needed, and his body was opened up. The right ventricle of his heart was found to have ‘burst, and the pericardium filled with a great quantity of coagulated blood’. The left ventricle was empty, and the ‘coats of all the vessels were worn away extremely thin’. No wonder the king ‘had been frequently out of order of late’.
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