Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (50 page)

On Friday 24 October 1760, a seventy-six-year-old George II was dining at Kensington Palace, his residence for the entire summer. What would prove to be his final meal consisted of soup, salmon, mutton, ham, sweetbreads, ‘ravioles’, prawns and jelly.
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Later that night he passed the hours between nine and eleven quietly playing cards, as usual, with his daughter Princess Amelia and his mistress Amalie. Although there’d been many contenders for her title, Amalie had so far seen off her challengers and was once again the king’s paramount paramour.

During this evening of mild domestic activity, something unusual was happening to George II’s heart. Over the years, its muscles had been starved of oxygen by the layers of fat narrowing their feeder arteries. (This had caused his long-familiar chest pains.) The weakened right ventricle of his heart was now pumping under immense pressure and was on the point of losing the battle to bludgeon blood round his body.

While the physical organ was wearing out and its beat softening, the king’s heart in the metaphysical sense, too, had never been softer.

This was visible in his surprisingly sympathetic recent behaviour towards those he loved.

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Kensington in 1760 was very different from the animated, vibrant community which Henrietta had relinquished in 1734. Caroline’s illness had seen the beginning of the end of the high life there. After her death, the king had ‘locked up half the palace’, and during these later years there was ‘scarce enough company to pay for lighting the candles’.
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Time no longer mattered, and even the
clocks were ‘very foul and out of repair’.
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Horace Walpole gives an evocative description of the geriatric court at Kensington: its members were ‘seldom young: they sun themselves in a window, like flies in autumn, past even buzzing’, all ready ‘to be swept away in the first hurricane of a new reign’.
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The aged king, seen for once with a smile on his lips. His heart softened towards the end of his life

 

The king had now reached a greater age than any of his predecessors upon the throne. The only people he still wanted to see were his old friends and, even among them, he preferred the ones who had been ‘beauties in his younger days’.
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A visiting Frenchman vividly conjures up a former femme fatale of the court as she tries to maintain former standards in an increasingly grotesque parody of glamour. She travels in her sedan chair to an evening drawing room, her face ‘painted up to the eyes … the glasses of the vehicle are drawn up that the winds of Heaven may not visit the powder and paint too roughly’.

Encased in glass like a natural-history specimen, she ‘does not ill resemble the foetus of a hippopotamus in a brandy bottle’.
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Kensington and the courtiers had changed; so had the world outside the palace gates. Britain’s support of Austria against the
Prussians and the French had looked likely to embroil her in continental warfare at the time of the battle of the mistresses in 1742. Matters came to a head the following year, and George II’s military enthusiasm got the better of concerns for his safety and senility. His second great personal military triumph took place at the advanced age of fifty-nine.

The location was the battlefield of Dettingen, in what is now south-west Germany; the enemies were the French, and the engagement was part of the War of the Austrian Succession. This was a gallant cause: the defence of the right of Maria Theresa of Austria to inherit her father’s throne despite her gender. A soldier present saw cannonballs fly ‘within half a yard’ of George II’s head. When it was suggested that he should leave the field, he answered, ‘
Don’t tell me of danger
, I’ll be even with them!’ ‘He is certainly the boldest man I ever saw,’ one eyewitness gushed. George II was undoubtedly bold, and inspiring too, as he yelled: ‘
Now, boys
, –
Now for the honour of
England,
fire, and behave brave,
and the
French
will soon run
.’
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After the success of the 1743 campaign that included the king’s own victory at Dettingen, ‘female loyalty was brilliantly displayed’ in Kensington Gardens. A company of ladies raised subscriptions to pay for a ‘gala, and rural illumination, that darkened the stars’. In a last burst of splendour, Kensington Palace was illuminated with wax lights and ‘the trees at a distance, in front of every angle, were equally resplendent’.
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But the advantage gained at Dettingen was not followed up, and war weariness set in during the latter part of 1743. British troops were pulled out of the continent in 1745 and brought home to deal with the second major uprising of the Jacobites. The outlook was distinctly dicey: Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender (or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), had landed in Scotland; he and his rebel forces had achieved early successes against the British army and now they were heading south towards London.

During the weeks of the rebel advance, the tension in the drawing room mounted inexorably. Yet George II kept up an impressive
show of sangfroid: ‘void of the least appearance of fear … with cheerfulness enough to give spirit to others’. One person present acknowledged the enormous strain the king must have endured to maintain this display: ‘I never saw him I think show so much of true greatness as he then did.’
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When they reached Derby, though, the Jacobite forces lost heart and turned back. George II was triumphant over the Young Pretender, just as George I had vanquished his father the Old Pretender in 1715. The British were extremely affronted that an enemy had dared to invade so deeply into their realm, and they exhibited a great surge of patriotic pride in their country and king. Having survived this crisis, the Hanoverians seemed at last to be safe and secure upon the throne. A visitor to a crowded, celebratory court reported that ‘I never saw anybody in such glee as the King.’
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In George II’s extreme old age, though, a new, protracted and more global conflict had broken out: the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War). It all began in the Ohio valley, where British and French colonists came to blows with the Native Americans. This local dust-up escalated in due course into the first-ever ‘World War’, and the competition between France and England flared up as far afield as the Philippines and Canada.

In 1756, there was major political upheaval in Europe when Britain abandoned its old ally Austria in favour of Prussia and once again declared war against France. Suddenly, though, there was a string of ignominious military defeats on both sides of the Atlantic – the loss of Minorca, defeat in Carolina, an unsuccessful attack on Ticonderoga – a series of disasters which brought the government into contempt and ‘much diminished the national affection borne towards the Sovereign’.
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More dissatisfaction was caused by the creeping taxes – now newly applied to coaches and servants, for example – which were needed to pay for all this bellicosity.

In his old age George II was still to be seen reviewing the
troops from the ramparts of the garden wall at Kensington, and he remained a soldier at heart. In 1759, the recklessly aggressive James Wolfe was appointed general of the fighting forces in Canada. When complaints were made on the grounds that Wolfe was mad, the sparky old king famously retorted: ‘Mad, is he? I wish he would bite some of my other generals.’
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And something of Wolfe’s mad fighting spirit did rub off on the rest of the army and navy. George II had been forced by the ‘misfortunes and disgraces’ of 1756 to invite William Pitt to take over the government and conduct of national affairs. Despite the king’s dislike of Pitt and his ‘utmost reluctance’ to work with him, the new ‘Prime Minister’ performed magnificently as a war leader.

His strategy was ‘to win North America on the plains of Europe’, forcing the French to fight there as well as in the further theatre of India. By 1759, Britain’s army and navy contained record numbers of troops:71,000 in the fleet and 52,000 available to fight on land.
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And they won her the upper hand at last. In the final eighteen months before George II’s quiet last supper at Kensington, he and Pitt had achieved huge success upon the world stage. The French had been driven from Canada; Britain’s great empire had expanded rapidly. In a sharp contrast with earlier years, the king by 1760 ‘certainly enjoyed great and universal popularity’.

It was to Mr Pitt that he owed ‘this gratifying distinction at the close of life, when Victory was said to have erected her altar between his aged knees’.
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Despite these military triumphs, nothing could rejuvenate the court. It was a long time since guests had found ‘the square full of coaches; the rooms full of company, everything gay and laughing’.
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The sedan chairs that did manage to totter towards the sparse drawing rooms of the reign’s closing years came through a London much better built than that of 1720. An architect wrote that George II’s period in power had seen bare boards (stained
brown ‘with soot and small beer to hide the dirt’) give way to carpeted floors, stone hearths replaced by marble, the woven rush seats of chairs superseded by damask upholstery.
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But despite these improvements in living standards, the city was still incommoded with dirt and disease. In August 1760, there’d been a cull of rabid dogs, with two shillings promised for every canine corpse.

Meanwhile, at Kensington Palace, Jane Keen, the old housekeeper, was distracted by a messy and ridiculous legal dispute with the neighbouring parish over a footpath: ‘if they will send me to jail I promise you I am ready to go’.
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Damp seeped into the bones of the surviving residents of this palace built over a running stream, and many of the courtiers once familiar to us had already passed over the Styx.

Horace Walpole’s father, Sir Robert, was long dead. He had been ushered out of life in 1745 by none other than the Dr John Ranby who had also supervised Queen Caroline’s departure.

Like Walpole senior, John Hervey had never really recovered his spirits after they both left government office in 1742. Only a year after the battle of the rival mistresses he too was dying, of ‘disappointment, rage and a distempered condition’.
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In one of his final letters, written in June 1743, Hervey celebrated the only one of his significant relationships to survive: that with his tireless correspondent Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads,’ he wrote in his final farewell to her. ‘May all your ways … be ways of pleasantness, and all your paths peace … Adieu.’
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John Hervey wrote an epitaph for himself that summed up all the warped but in some ways laudable integrity that led to his unhappy, fruitless and isolated later years:

It had been a long time since he had loved and been loved by his treated her with extraordinary harshness in his will, leaving her the bare legal minimum: ‘Whatever I am obliged to leave my wife by the writing signed at our marriage she must have. I leave her nothing more.’
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The will caused a scandal, and it was said that John Hervey had ‘finished his charming character by it’.
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Molly, with fine diplomacy, found her late husband ‘no more to be mistaken, or forgot, than to be imitated, being indeed inimitable’.
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