Read Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court Online
Authors: Lucy Worsley
Tags: #England, #History, #Royalty
Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (44 page)
Caroline’s loss was deeply felt outside the household, too, with naughty posters again appearing round town:
Oh death, where is thy sting?
To take the Queen, and leave the King?
146
London became ‘the most dismal of places’, for all plays and operas were forbidden for three months after Caroline’s death.
147
George II grimly pressed on with his job and managed to host a drawing-room party in January 1738. But he appeared in public for a mere two minutes, with ‘grief still fixed on his face’.
148
The Opposition claimed that the court’s mourning was over the top and injurious to trade. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ingeniously argued the other side of the case: as people were forbidden from wearing foreign silk for the duration, a great boost would be given ‘to the woollen manufacture, the staple commodity of these kingdoms’.
149
Caroline’s death also meant that no one at court had any further use for Peter the Wild Boy, so he was honourably retired to the country farm in Hertfordshire where Bedchamber Woman Mrs Titchborne had been accustomed to spend her summer holidays.
150
The year 1735 had seen the death of his tutor, Dr Arbuthnot, who’d remained to the end ‘unalterable, both in friendship and quadrille’, and who was sincerely missed by his buddies for ‘the excellence of his heart’.
151
But nobody at court much missed the ‘merry Doctor with his Wild Pupil’ in the face of their greater loss.
152
Sir Robert Walpole was also left ‘in the utmost distress’ by Caroline’s death.
153
And he may have the final thought on its cataclysmic significance.
‘Oh! my Lord,’ he exclaimed,
what a scene of confusion there will be! Who can tell into what hands the King will fall? Or who will have the management of him? I defy the ablest person in the kingdom to foresee what will be the consequence of this great event.
154
1
. Jonathan Swift, ‘Directions for making a BIRTH-DAY SONG, Written in the Year 1729’, in
The Beauties of Swift: or, the favourite offspring of wit & genius
(London, 1782), p. 211.
2
. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 435; Colvin (1976), p. 244.
3
. HMC
Egmont,
Vol. 2 (1923), p. 325.
4
. Sir John Soane’s Museum, Vol. 147/192–198; Marschner (2007), p. 271.
5
. Ross (2006), p. 269 (John Arbuthnot to Jonathan Swift, 5 November 1726);Hervey (1894), Vol. 3, p. 37; Cowper (1864), p. 13.
6
. Ilchester (1950), p. 269.
7
. Quoted in Smith (2006), p. 36; Hastings Wheler (1935), p. 152, Lady Catherine Jones (24 December 1737).
8
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 446.
9
. Clarke (1738), p. 25.
10
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 372–3.
11
. TNA SP 36/111, Ryder to Newcastle (16 October 1749).
12
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 485.
13
.
Ibid.
, Vol. 3, pp. 656–7.
14
.
Ibid.
, Vol. 2, pp. 372–3.
15
. BL Add MS 22227, f. 157, Peter Wentworth to his brother (10 December 1734).
16
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 442.
17
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 373, 374.
18
. William Byrd, ‘A discourse concerning the plague’, in Maude H. Woodfin (Ed.),
Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover
,
1739–1741
,
with letters and literary exercises 1696–1726
(Richmond, Virginia, 1942), p. 430.
19
. Grundy (1999), pp. 99–100.
20
. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 274.
21
. Woodfin (1942), p. 429.
22
. Smith (2006), pp. 93–4.
23
.
Brice’s Weekly Journal
(8 April 1726), p. 3.
24
. Grundy (1999), p. 218.
25
. E. F. D. Osborn (Ed.),
Political and Social Letters of a Lady of the Eighteenth-Century
(London, 1890), p. 25 (the ‘Lady’ is Sarah Osborn, née Byng).
26
. Kroll (1998), p. 260.
27
. Osborn (1890), p. 25.
28
. BL Sloane MS 4076, f. 99r.
29
. William Wagstaffe,
A Letter To Dr Freind, Shewing The Danger and
Uncertainty of Inoculating the Small Pox
(London, 1722), pp. 5–6.
30
. Grundy (1999), p. 217.
31
. Adrian Wilson, ‘The Politics of Medical Improvement in Early Hanoverian London’, in Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Eds),
The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth-Century
(Cambridge, 1990), pp. 4–39.
32
. Andrew Stone to the elder Horace Walpole (11 November 1737), quoted in John Heneage
Jesse,
Memoirs of the Court of England
(London, 1843), Vol. 3, p. 105.
33
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 443.
34
. BL Add MS 7075, f. 1v (7 January 1706).
35
. TNA SP 81/162, f. 258r, Howe to Harley (Hanover, 1/5 February 1707).
36
. Preussisches Staatsarchiv, Hanover, MS Y. 46c, XI, ff. 114–5, quoted in Arkell (1939), p. 46.
37
. BL Add MS 61463, f. 88v, Mary Cowper to Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Hampton Court (20 August 1716); BL MS Lansdowne 1013, f. 203, Dr White Kennet to Rev. Samuel Blackwell (9 November 1716).
38
. BL Add 78465, f. 79v, Mrs Boscawen to Lady Evelyn (8 November 1716).
39
. Cowper (1864), p. 126; Friedrich-Wilhelm Schaer (Ed.),
Briefe der Gräfin
Johanna Sophie zu Schaumburg-Lippe
(Rinteln, 1968), pp. 46–8.
40
. BL MS Lansdowne 1013, f. 203, Dr White Kennet to Rev. Samuel Blackwell (9 November 1716).
41
. Cowper (1864), p. 127; BL Add 78465, f. 79v, Mrs Boscawen to Lady Evelyn (8 November 1716).
42
. Cowper (1864), p. 127.
43
. Kroll (1998), p. 201 (1 December 1716).
44
.
The London Gazette
No. 5587 (5 November 1717).
45
. Thomson (1847), p. 333, Countess Cowper to Mrs Clayton (undated but about the time that the Duke of Cumberland was born).
46
. BL Add MS 20102, f. 24, Lady Carteret to Mrs Clayton (19 December 1724).
47
. Ilchester (1950), p. 257.
48
. RA GEO/ADD 17/75/85 (1733); Marschner (1997), p. 31
49
. Medical information kindly provided by Dr Randle McRoberts.
50
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 443
51
. Walpole,
Reminiscences
(1818 edn), pp. 89, 90.
52
. Duchess of Marlborough to the second Earl of Stair (1 December 1737), quoted in Cunningham (1857), Vol. 1, p. cxlviii.
53
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 890.
54
. Wraxall (1904), p. 257.
55
. Sir Robert Walpole to his brother Horace Walpole (15 November 1737), quoted in Jesse (1843), Vol. 3, pp. 106–7.
56
. Saussure (1902), p. 46.
57
. Ilchester (1950), p. 182.
58
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 319.
59
. Burford (1988), p. 42.
60
. Pottle (1950), p. 227.
61
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 891.
62
. Franklin (1993), p. 95.
63
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 490.
64
. Nicolas Venette,
Conjugal Love Reveal
’
d
(seventh, English edn of 1720), pp. 161,118.a letter
from Mrs Selwyn to Mrs Lowther
65
. Anon.,
The Ladies Physical Directory
(‘the eighth edition, with some very material additions’, London, 1742), p. 70.
66
. Harvey (1994; 2001), pp. 40–1.
67
. ‘Prostitution’ in
The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review
, Vol. 53 (April–July 1850), p. 457.
68
. Thomas Laqueur,
Making Sex, Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1990).
69
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 609.
70
. Verney (1930), Vol. 2, p. 129 (10 August 1738).
71
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), pp. 424, 299.
72
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 457, 502, 503.
73
. BL Add MS 23728, f. 15, Countess of Hertford to Lady Luxborough (8 November 1745).
74
. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 272.75.
75
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 445.
76
. TNA SP 84/161, p. 543, Poley to Harley (Hanover, 9 June 1705).
77
. The Elector of Hanover to Privy Councillor von Eltz, Hanover (17 June 1705), quoted in Wilkins (1901), Vol. 1, p. 44.
78
. Documents in the Royal Archives at Hanover, quoted in Wilkins (1901), Vol. 1, pp. 48–54.
79
. TNA SP 84/161, p. 594, Poley to Harley (Hanover, 28 July 1705).
80
. Preussisches Staatsarchiv, Hanover, MS Y. 46c, XI, ff. 106–111, quoted in Arkell (1939), pp. 23–4.
81
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 641–2.
82
. Advertised in the back of William Beckett,
A Collection of Chirurgical Tracts
(London, 1740).
83
. Walpole,
Reminiscences
(1818 edn), p. 28.
84
. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 38, p. 456 (1 November 1764).
85
. Cartwright (1883), p. 533.
86
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 906; Cartwright (1883), p. 533.
87
. ‘Some curious Observations made (by my Friend John Ranby, Esq; Surgeon to his Majesty’s Household, and F.R.S.) in the Dissection of Three Subjects,1728’, in Beckett (1740), pp. 77–9.
88
. Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones
(London, 1749; 1991), p. 302.
89
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), pp. 444–6.
90
. Hastings Wheler (1935), p. 153, Lady Catherine Jones (24 December 1737).
91
. Brown (1700), p. 93.
92
. John Ashton,
Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne
(London, 1882), p. 8.
93
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 881.
94
.
Ibid
., p. 889.
95
. Burford (1988), p. 31.
96
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 580–2.
97
. Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, pp. 151–2.
98
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, pp. 885, 889.1895), p. 78,
99
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), pp. 443–4.
100
.
Ibid
., pp. 445–6.
101
. Lady Jane van Koughnet,
A History of Tyttenhanger
(London, 1895), p. 78, ‘Copy’d from a Letter of Mrs. Purcel (a Dresser to y
e
late Queen) to a Lady at Bath’; another copy is at RA GEO/MAIN/52824, catalogued as ‘copy of a letter from Mrs Selwyn to Mrs Lowther’ (soon after 29 November 1737).
102
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 444.
103
. BL 22227, f. 185, Peter Wentworth to his brother (19 November 1737).
104
. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, pp. 905–6.
105
. Alexander Pope, ‘On Queen
Caroline
’
s
Death-bed’, in Norman Ault and John Butt (Eds),
Alexander Pope
,
Minor Poems
(London and New York, 1964), p.390.
106
. HMC
Egmont
, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 445.
107
. Hervey (1894), Vol. 3, p. 177, Lady Bristol to Lord Bristol (19 November 1737).
108
. Koughnet (1895), pp. 77–8.
