Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (14 page)

Kent’s staircase put this philosophy into painted form.

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There was no shortage of potential sitters. The royal household contained a Decipherer, a Secretary for translating into Latin, an Embellisher of Letters to Foreign Princes and forty-eight Chaplains, who attended in shifts of four. Then there was the Master of the Revels, the Surveyor of the Waterworks and the Keeper of the Lions in the Tower.
⁷³
Not least were the Clerk of the Spicery, the Yeomen of the Salt-Stores and the three ‘confectionaries’ who made the king’s cakes.
⁷⁴

In the end Kent selected forty-five sitters for his staircase. They were real servants with real jobs, some of them with considerable power and many of them living their whole lives at court rather than serving in rotation like the more senior courtiers. Chosen for their odd appearance or their close connection with the king, these figures must have been instantly recognisable to the denizens of Kensington Palace. Each must have sat for Kent or an assistant, willingly or unwillingly, for long enough to be painted
accurately enough to add to the masque-like effect. Most of them must have been filled with pride and pleasure at being asked to take part in this elaborate court joke.

Ulrich Jorry, the loud-mouthed dwarf, a lively court character who sometimes got into trouble

 

And Kent must have been delighted by his new-won power as he, the intruder, stage-managed the court to fulfil his vision.

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One of the great unsolved mysteries at Kensington Palace is the true identity of the forty-five different people shown on the staircase. And the first chapter of the mystery concerns Ulrich Jorry, the Polish dwarf.

A visitor to Kensington Palace writing in 1741 claimed the figures on the staircase included ‘Mr.
Ulrick
, commonly called the Young
Turk
, in his
Polonese
dress, as he waited on the late King
George
’.
⁷⁵

Christian Ulrich Jorry was a member of the long and proud parade of jesters/truthsayers close to England’s kings. His predecessors included, in the sixteenth century, King Henry VIII’s Will Somers and, in the seventeenth century, Queen Henrietta Maria’s Jeffery Hudson. Ulrich, like many a dwarf before him, was presented to George I as a gift, by the Duke of Saxe Gotha in this
case, whose envoy was given a present of
£
330 in return.
⁷⁶
(Jeffrey Hudson had also been a gift, and had made his entrance by jumping out of a pie served at Henrietta Maria’s birthday party.)

Despite his small stature, Ulrich had an immensely loud, foundation-shaking voice, almost deafening enough to ‘endanger the Royal Palace’ at full volume.
⁷⁷
Sometimes he wore Turkish dress, sometimes a fur-trimmed Polish cap.
⁷⁸
Ulrich also benefited from English and painting lessons at the king’s expense, and had his own servants.

Notwithstanding the claims of the 1741 guidebook, though, there is no figure present on the staircase with a close resemblance to Ulrich. We know exactly what he looks like from another picture of George I’s court depicting a hunting expedition (it hangs today over a photocopier in an office at Buckingham Palace). Ulrich, clearly labelled, is excitedly beating his horse, a determined expression on his chubby round face.
⁷⁹
Although tall enough to ride a pony, he is obviously a person of restricted growth, and his likeness cannot be spotted in the staircase mural.

However, two more exotic servants, Mohammed and Mustapha, do indeed appear, without doubt, at the upper turn in the staircase. They flank an unknown but seductive lady.

The power and strangeness of the two Turks made them targets of suspicion and envy among the English. Gossip reported that the king ‘keeps two Turks for abominable uses’, and the British were full of ‘base reflections … that a TURK should be employed so near the
Throne
’.
⁸⁰

They were paid privately out of George I’s Privy Purse and did all the work of washing and dressing him. These menial jobs, including activities such as warming a king’s shirt by the fire, handing it to him or – best of all – attending him in what he called ‘our Secret or Privy Room, when we go to ease ourself’, had long been hotly contested.
⁸¹
Since the time of Henry VIII, the Groom of the Stool had the dubious honour of accompanying the king when ‘he goeth to make water’ and of handing him the flannel ‘to wipe the nether end’.
⁸²
These positions of intimacy with the king
were traditionally the most powerful in a court of the
ancien
régime
, and in the past had been performed by noblemen.

Left: Mohammed, not a royal sex toy, but a discreet, trusted and loyal servant. Right: Mustapha, who was snatched from his Turkish home and family in his youth but retained his Turkish dress. Turkish servants were a status symbol in the West

 

When George I became king, though, he’d made no appointment to the post of Groom of the Stool, and broke with custom by insisting that he would dress in private. Much to the annoyance of the senior British courtiers, they were kept out of the bedchamber. There the Turks ruled supreme.

On the staircase Mohammed is boldly dressed in a blue cape with much gold braid, his head cropped, his eyebrow superciliously curved. His colleague Mustapha, on the other hand, loiters in the background, worried, older, white-bearded and turbaned. He presents a more exotic appearance, and indeed his waistcoat bears a Turkish crescent moon over his heart.

The pair had many royal secrets to keep. In August 1717, George I showed the symptoms of haemorrhoids, or swellings in his anal arteries. The horrific dangers of surgical removal – being ‘cut for the piles’ – were well known. The whole matter was kept secret from the English courtiers. Only the trusted Mohammed was able
to persuade the king to undergo a medical examination, and all proved well, although George I had to avoid sitting upon a saddle.
⁸³
In gratitude the king nominated Mohammed for a special title to be awarded by the Holy Roman Emperor. His devoted servant chose the appropriate troponym ‘von Königstreu’, or ‘True to the King’.

The two Turks had made a long journey to reach their current privileged position. Mohammed’s father had been a pasha, sent by his superiors within the Ottoman hierarchy to govern part of Peloponnesian Greece.
⁸⁴
The Muslim Ottoman and the Christian Hapsburg Empires clashed frequently in the late seventeenth century, and George I himself had campaigned in Hungary against the Turks, helping to lift the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. At some early but unknown point in his life, the young Mohammed was captured by a Hanoverian officer and brought to Germany, where he made a conversion to Christianity and a marriage to the daughter of a wealthy brewer.

Entering George I’s service and following the king to England, Mohammed worked his way up from ‘bodyservant’ (
Leibdiener
) to the much grander ‘Keeper of the King’s Closet’.
⁸⁵
Mustapha, his junior colleague, made a similar journey. He arrived in Hanover after a period in the service of the Swedish army officer who had captured him.

Mohammed, controller of access to the king, was such a favoured servant that he was painted several times during his lifetime. He was effectively (if not officially) Master of the Robes and Keeper of the Privy Purse to the king, both important jobs.
⁸⁶
Government ministers often paid him court. He had his own servant, who helped him wash the king’s clothes, and he slept in a grand four-poster bed upholstered in scarlet and trimmed with lace.
⁸⁷
Mustapha was also rich enough to employ a private tutor for his sons.
⁸⁸

Mohammed’s even greater responsibilities and pay were earned through his discretion and his solid, reliable character. ‘Never did he burden the ear of his Royal Master, with complaints,’ it was said, nor did he ‘ever presume to ask a favour’. Like Mustapha, he
was a family man. Of his ‘dear wife’, Maria Hedewig Mohammed, a wealthy woman of Hanover, he declared: ‘I love her most heartily.’
⁸⁹
They had a daughter and two sons, and it’s no surprise to find that their names – Sophia Caroline, Johann Ludewig and George Ludewig – were borrowed from the family Mohammed had served for nearly forty years.

*

However, William Kent did not choose just the most colourfully dressed members of the court to decorate his staircase. He could also be attracted by a pretty face. When he first met Mrs Elizabeth Tempest, Princess Caroline’s milliner, he was ‘so struck with her appearance, as to beg her to sit for her picture’.
⁹⁰
To judge from her lovely visage, and her hyper-fashionable black hood, Mrs Tempest is probably the lady in the group near the window.
⁹¹

Kent also included a number of scarlet-clad Yeomen of the Guard. The one hundred Yeomen of the Guard by now formed a great British institution, providing the king with a bodyguard whenever he left the palace.
⁹²
Created shortly after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to protect the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, this royal bodyguard has remained in continuous existence ever since.
⁹³
Since the reign of Henry VIII, the Yeomen had worn ‘scarlet, with braidings and laces of gold’. Their right hands grasped a ceremonial partisan, or bladed staff.
⁹⁴
An Italian visitor to London in 1669 provided the first mention of their alternative, informal name: ‘They are called “Beefeaters”, that is, eaters of beef, of which a considerable portion is allowed them daily by the Court.’
⁹⁵

It’s harder to know the identity of the other figures: the ladies, the children, the gigantic Scotsman and the gentleman commonly known as ‘The Mysterious Quaker’. William Pyne, writing a history of the royal residences in 1819, when George I’s court was only just out of living memory, made a series of further identifications which sound reasonable but can’t be proved.
⁹⁶
He claimed that the young page hanging precariously on the drop side of the balcony worked for Henrietta Howard. If that is indeed Henrietta’s page,
then maybe the little dog looking between the balusters is Fop, her spoiled and crabby lapdog, to whom Alexander Pope’s dog Bounce wrote this poem: