Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (54 page)

Nevertheless, the heart of the palace beat on, and, after heading his blank page ‘this morning his most gracious Majesty departed this life’, the kitchen clerk stolidly enumerated the supplies the kitchen would still require for the day: five ducks, two dozen larks, two quarts of shrimps, two barrels of oysters, two pecks of French beans and twelve dozen peaches.
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Hungry mouths still waited to be fed.

The Lord Chamberlain now ordered the same court mourning as had been decreed for George I back in 1727:black bombazines, black crape hoods, gloves and crape fans; the whole palace of St James’s was to be hung with black.
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At another royal death, that of Princess Caroline three years previously, ‘everybody that think themselves anybody’ wore deep mourning, and ladies who’d worn
even black flounces on their skirts had been told to remove them.
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Now, once again, the many who considered themselves intimate enough with the royal family to wear mourning made an assault upon the shops, and over 1,500 yards of crape were sold by one retailer in Bath on the Sunday night.
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Those unrecognised by the shopkeepers as regular customers, or those with a ‘Right Honourable’ before their name, had to pay a shilling more than others for the same stuff.
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By Saturday night London was completely empty of hackney horses, as so many messengers had been sent to take the news to ‘persons of distinction’ all over the kingdom; and every hour brought new arrivals to London as the nobility began to gather for the funeral that would follow.
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The change of monarch meant that the court was once again full of ‘hopes and fears’, and that even the most potent of George II’s ‘great lords look[ed] as if they dreaded wanting bread’.
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The king’s funeral ceremonies began at 7 p.m. on 9 November, when his bowels were carried from Kensington to the royal vault in Henry VII’s chapel, Westminster Abbey. The bowels led the way because they’d been removed from the corpse during the process of embalming it and needed to be disposed of first. The rest of his body followed the next day, carried to its hearse by twelve faithful Yeomen of the Guard. On 11 November, they carried it from the Prince’s Chamber at Westminster, where it had rested overnight, into the vault itself.
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The king had given instructions that he wanted his and Caroline’s dust to mingle in a joint coffin.
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He now rejoined his wife, the love of his life.

So, at length, George II was buried, a king who had never perhaps quite lived or loved well enough, but who had done his best to live up to his idea of his job under trying circumstances. At his birth nobody could have predicted the chain of coincidences that would lead to his becoming king of Great Britain, and many of his hopes of personal happiness had been crushed by the unlucky crown.

Now he was respectfully mourned, and sermons were preached on the text: ‘he died in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour’.
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‘Posterity will celebrate him as a good Prince,’ mused one of his courtiers, ‘tho’ many of the present age knew him not to have been an amiable man.’
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Only a month later, though, one of George II’s former subjects could write that ‘he seems already to be almost forgotten’.
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This was partly because there was now a vigorous young king to excite people. Luckily George III felt himself more equal than his grandfather to the task of ruling, more British than Hanoverian. He famously declared that, unlike his predecessors, he’d been born and educated in the country, and gloried ‘in the name of Britain’.
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He was resolved, too, ‘to introduce a new custom’: that all his ‘family should live well together’, because he was ‘very sorry for the misunderstandings that there had formerly been’.
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Soon Henrietta was once again required, for she was one of the few people who could teach the court about the ceremonies now to be followed. At the coronation of Queen Charlotte, George III’s new young wife, which took place in September 1761, it was Henrietta who best remembered the jewels and rules that Queen Caroline had worn and obeyed in 1727, and her advice was sought.
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So who were the winners and losers of the second Georgian age, which ended so ignominiously in the water closet on 25 October 1760?

Two days after the king’s death, Horace Walpole paid a visit to Kensington Palace, the scene of so many triumphs and disasters for our courtiers. He was on his way to see Lady Yarmouth, the former Amalie von Wallmoden, who’d managed to hold off all her rivals until the very end of the battle of the mistresses.

Much had changed since Horace Walpole had last tripped into the porter’s lodge of the palace. Although he and his father had been so closely associated with the old court, he was not even recognised on that autumn morning. ‘No one knew me’, he wrote. ‘They asked my name – when they heard it, they did not seem ever
to have heard it before, even in that house. I waited half an hour in a lodge with a footman of Lady Yarmouth’s.’

Yet he took his loss of prestige with his customary dry philosophy: ‘I smiled to myself.’
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When he finally breached the palace’s new defences, Walpole found that his old friend Amalie was emotionally, but not financially, distressed. There would now be little to detain her in Britain, except the ‘
£
9,000 in bank bills and 11 bags with a 100 gold sovereigns in each’ that the king had left for her in his bureau. Alongside the money he gave her his ‘2 gold snuff boxes’, each containing a cherished miniature picture of Amalie herself.
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It was a reasonable, but not astronomical, compensation for the mistress who’d never really possessed her lover’s heart. (Jane Keen, the palace’s old housekeeper, would also die a fairly wealthy woman: the estate she left included
£
3,500 and a portrait of herself wearing diamond earrings.
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)

Amalie soon returned to her birthplace in Hanover, and died there of ‘a cancer in her breast’ only five years later, aged sixty-one.
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At her death, a rather wild report claimed that she’d made so much money out of George II that she’d been able to leave her two sons ‘a million of crowns’.
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This vast sum was probably plucked from the air by the sort of people who thought, wrongly, that a German royal mistress was bound to have made enormous profit from her position. Her son Johann Ludwig, who was George II’s final if unacknowledged child, built a mansion near Herrenhausen, entered the Hanoverian army, served in the French revolutionary war and died in 1811.
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His house is now a museum of cartoons.

Amalie’s ties with her unofficial step-family, George II’s children, were obviously not strong enough to long survive his death. William Augustus, the fat Duke of Cumberland, had suffered a stroke just two months before his father’s final heart attack. From this he recovered the power of speech but not of full movement, and he was not popular with the new courtiers now surrounding his nephew George III. Butcher-like to the end, he talked about ‘the vermin the court is now full of’ under the new regime; ‘vermin’ 
was a term he had also used when flushing out and killing the Jacobites in 1745.
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He died in 1765.

Meanwhile, Molly Hervey’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Chudleigh, was reported to have been deeply upset by the demise of George II, her quondam lover, although her grief was not taken entirely seriously. One person thought her weeping was caused by a bad oyster rather than the death of a close attachment.
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Perhaps she was regretting the time when she’d been so close to the prize of becoming chief mistress, or perhaps she was mourning the loss of a youth not to be regained by ‘sticking roses and sweet peas in one’s hair, as Miss Chudleigh still does!’
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Whether or not she was legitimately married to the Duke of Kingston, and whether or not she was truly a duchess, no one will ever know. If her first marriage to Augustus Hervey was in fact valid, she became a legitimate countess at least, because his elder brother died before him and he inherited the family title.

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‘The court’s a golden, but a fatal circle’ reads the inscription to
Court tales: or, a History of the Amours of the Present Nobility
, and the real winners were those who had escaped from the gilded cage.
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Molly Hervey was left tranquil by the king’s death. She looked forward enthusiastically to the reign of George III and continued to enjoy the company of Horace Walpole and her other witty friends. She ‘gave dinners, and was always at home in an evening to a select company: men of letters and
beaux esprits
’, preserving into old age the ‘uncommon remains’ of her beauty.
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Walpole’s devotion to her was all the stronger because – and we would expect no less from Molly – she combined ‘great goodness with great severity’ towards him, and was always glad to take him down a peg or two.
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Henrietta had likewise proved herself to be, as Lord Peterborough put it, a

George II’s death brought with it the end of her court pension, but at the age of seventy-one she retained ‘spirits and cleverness and imagination’. Horace Walpole worshipped her for her conversation and her ‘old court-knowledge’.
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At nearly eighty she still had ‘all her senses as perfect as ever’, except, of course, for her long-lost hearing.
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Walpole, addicted to her anecdotes, lamented their life in Twickenham when he was detained in London, and longed for its ‘roses, strawberries, & banks of the river’.
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‘Pray keep a little summer for me,’ he begged her, and ‘I will give you a bushel of politics, when I come to Marblehill, for a teacup of strawberries & cream.’
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When she’d left court in 1734, a friend rightly commended Henrietta on her wise choice of pleasures: ‘old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read; you may be sure of enjoying all these … in a more perfect degree than
his majesty or
his queen
’.
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Apart from the devoted Walpole, Henrietta’s life was now lived among the recollected characters of times long gone. One of her few surviving friends thought of her as a sage, a wise woman well left to herself, ‘to think of what is past, so as to be able to judge of what is to come’.
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We leave Henrietta and Horace talking together happily about the gory, glory days of the 1730s, celebrating the fulfilment of a wish so often expressed when she was in court bondage and put into the words of her former friend Alexander Pope:

Princess Amelia was another of Horace Walpole’s friends, although they had frequent fallings-out. After losing her palace apartments following her father’s death, the princess became another of the formidable retired court ladies of west London,
buying Gunnersbury House in Ealing, Middlesex.
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She spent the rest of her life criticising her nephew, George III, who ignored her, and left her estate to her unlucky sister Mary’s children.

Molly, Henrietta and Princess Amelia all endured vicious attacks from their contemporaries: Molly for her status-consciousness and shyness; Henrietta for her bland conversation and lack of exceptional looks; Amelia for her bluntness and rudeness. But this was really because all three women had dared to be different. They could not help discomfiting the world by giving it a glimpse of what women were not supposed to have: wit, humour and inner resources.

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The other survivor among the courtiers was Peter the Wild Boy. In 1760, he was still living on a farm in Berkhamsted, the little market town just north-west of London. It sits in a shallow valley, in low, rolling country, with neat fields, wooded hills and snug timber-framed buildings along a high street larded with coaching inns. In and about this town Peter enjoyed a life of quiet enjoyment and wore an iron collar marked with his name and address so that people could bring him home again when he wandered off.