Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (56 page)

My search for the stories of the people who lived and worked in the Georgian royal palaces began on William Kent’s staircase at Kensington. The more I learnt about their lives, the more convinced I became that the whole sumptuous and luxurious cocoon of court life was in many ways a prison.

This was as true for kings and queens as it was for their servants. The first two Georges were rather successful in smoothing over the religious and social cracks in the realm that they had accidentally inherited. They worked hard at the job of being king. But there’s something sad and stunted about their lives off duty. In personal terms they paid a high price for their royal role.

History has not been kind to either of them. George I has been marginalised within the story of Britain, his German ‘otherness’ made less threatening by transposing him into a minor key and making him into a quaint buffoon. (According to one widely read Victorian historian, he and Melusine – his ‘antiquated Sultana’ – liked nothing better than to spend the evening cutting paper into various shapes.
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And George II has an even less enviable reputation than his ‘dull and dreary’ father. Sandwiched in royal history between his father (founder of a new dynasty) and George III (the ‘mad’ king who lost America), George II has been practically forgotten. If he ever appears in pub quizzes, it’s merely as the last monarch to lead his troops in person on the battlefield.

Few people today could name his other achievements or the great events of his reign, which was marked by growing peace and prosperity, an emerging sense of nationhood and the successful seizure of all of France’s power in North America. All these things
helped to define and promote a new sense of what it meant to be ‘British’.

Yet ironically they were achieved by foreign rulers whom the British themselves promptly forgot.

Despite the strenuous efforts of historians to ‘rescue’ George II from his embattled reputation as a slightly useless king, a ‘king in toils’ as one biographer put it, they have largely failed.
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Caroline’s reputation has survived far better than her husband’s. Thanks to John Hervey’s efforts, she has long been feted as a cultured and clever woman who was sorely tried by her German-accented husband’s well-known hatred for all of her ‘boets and bainters’. She is something of a celebrity among eighteenth-century queens: generous, enlightened, a very human ray of light illuminating the murky world of the court.

Contemporaries Horace Walpole and John Hervey have done more than anyone to shape perceptions of George II and his court. Both are much-loved, much-loathed figures whose texts are treacherously opinionated as well as deliciously quotable. ‘Nothing can be more cheery than Horace’s letters,’ wrote William Thackeray in the nineteenth century. ‘Fiddles sing all through them: wax-lights, fine dresses, fine jokes, fine plate, fine equipages, glitter and sparkle there: never was such a brilliant, jigging, smirking Vanity Fair as that through which he leads us.’ Flicking through either writer, the court seems like a sparkling, amusing, playful place. But Thackeray could also see the dark side of Hervey’s memoirs: he found certain passages frightful, like wandering through a ‘city of the dead … through those godless intrigues and feasts, through crowds, pushing, and eager, and struggling – rouged, and lying, and fawning’.
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With George II’s death, the palace at Kensington fell from favour. To the new young king, ‘ceremony seems to have been always unpleasant; so that all the common splendour of a court was totally laid aside’, and his drawing-room gatherings were less frequent.
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George III’s young and lively court clearly brought with it a renewal of court life, but it was a little less focused upon the
court set piece, the ball and the levee, and never again did the full court return to Kensington.

George III’s accession brought change to the personnel of the royal household, although some old-timers like John Teed, his grandmother’s chocolate-maker, were still employed.
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There were also changes of style and tone. While his grandfather had been widely promiscuous, George III was faithful to his wife. While George II had spent his latter days in dark and stately private apartments with his mistress, George III presented his devoted wife and their numerous children as a model of family life for the nation to emulate. And while George II lived in lavish style, George III is best known for the periods in his life when he lived in modest domesticity at tiny Kew Palace. Like Kensington, Hampton Court Palace was also left deserted. Buckingham Palace (then known as The Queen’s House) and Windsor Castle became the favoured residences instead. The drawing room at Kensington quietly became a museum, and would in due course echo with the shuffling footsteps of curious tourists.

‘All this is now so changed that I seem to be speaking of the world before the flood,’ wrote one ex-courtier in her memoirs.
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While everything else was changed, though, one thing would remain the same in the next reign. George III had been scarred by the rows he had experienced between the earlier generations of his family. In due course the ‘reversionary interest’ worked its mischief once more, and, despite his best intentions, he too ended up at war with his own eldest son, the future George IV.

George III nevertheless went on to become one of the most popular kings ever, placing the monarchy on the track of pleasant respectability that Queen Victoria maintained with such success. She herself had a prudish distaste for her predecessors, George I and George II, and thought that ‘the morals of the ladies surrounding these sovereigns left much to be desired’.
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The decline of the drawing room was no bad thing. Despite its surface glamour, the life of a Georgian courtier – sought so earnestly by so many – was not a life to be longed for. Lord
Chesterfield felt he could never laugh; Molly Hervey took great trouble to disguise her intelligence; Georgian princesses knew that ‘at Court, one learns deceit’.
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All the avenues leading to the court, it was said, ‘are gay, smiling, agreeable to the sight, and all end in one and the same point, honour, and self-interest’.
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George II’s generation certainly did not regret the regular trauma of being ‘curled, powdered, dressed’ for court, always in ‘hurry and confusion’, and arriving only to be ‘touz’d and hunched’, ‘hot and dispirited’, ‘very pleasing to the sight, but perhaps not altogether so refreshing to the smell’.
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Until her death in 1786, Princess Amelia complained about the toxic trial of court attendance and pretended to be too deaf to go. (This was much to her nephew’s relief, for George III was ‘afraid of her frankness’.
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) Amelia herself was delighted to neglect the biweekly routine and revelled in the freedom to ‘stay them days comfortably at home & rest’.
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Henrietta finally died in 1767, and was visited on her life’s penultimate evening by the faithful Horace Walpole. He would sharply regret his ‘sincere and unalterable friend’ who had, in her long life, ‘seen, known and remembered so much’.
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Her final decade had been marred by penury, for her outgoings at Marble Hill exceeded her income. This once again brought a certain ‘anguish’ to ‘the last years of her life, though concealed’.
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Henrietta asked to be ‘buried as Mr Berkeley’s widow very privately as he was and with the Earl of Berkeley’s leave near him’.
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And so she ended up lying with her beloved second husband in his family mausoleum at Berkeley Castle.

Molly Hervey soon followed her, only a year later, and faced her death (from diarrhoea) bravely: ‘It is not
that
I fear, but ’tis the way to it; ’tis the struggles, the last convulsions that I dread; for once they are over, I don’t question but to rise to a new and better life.’
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These words formed part of the last letter she is known to have written. She died on 2 September 1768 and was buried a week later in the parish church at Ickworth.

She was not forgotten. The young daughter of a friend found
that Molly’s loving attention and lavish gifts of books had ‘fixed her so strongly in my memory that I see and hear her still’.
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And Horace Walpole, missing her dreadfully, recollected how her terrible ‘suffering with the gout’ could ‘never affect her patience or divert her attention to her friends’.
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Molly nevertheless went to the grave retaining something, still, of her intriguing air of mystery: ‘what her inside was my Lord only knew, and he I believe but partly’.
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The last survivor of all, Peter the Wild Boy, lived on quietly in Berkhamsted until the 1780s. He was constantly visited by the curious, including the novelist Maria Edgeworth, who commented that he looked in old age just like busts of Socrates. When sightseers gave him money, Peter meekly handed it over to the wife of the farmer who looked after him.
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He paid a last visit to court in 1767, at the request of George III, who wanted his family to see his grandmother’s pet.
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Then it was back to Berkhamsted. After his initial splashy arrival in London, he had lived a quiet and blameless life, largely forgotten, misunderstood but in some measure loved by the farming families who looked after him.

And Peter ended up deeply attached to his carers, the last of whom was Farmer Brill of Berkhamsted. Discovering the aged Farmer Brill dead in his bed one day, Peter ‘tried to awaken him, but finding his efforts unavailing, refused food, pined away, and died in a few days, without apparently any illness’.
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It was 22 February 1785.

Peter’s gravestone still lies by the south porch of the flinted church of St Mary at Northchurch, Berkhamsted, under a wild rose bush, surrounded by speedwell, wild parsley and marguerites. The lettering on his grave is painted and the plot is carefully tended. To this day a mysterious person regularly but discreetly places flowers on his grave, a person who has no connection with the church’s official Flower Guild.

One of the Guild’s members guesses that the flowers must be left by ‘someone who thinks he should be remembered’.
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At George II’s abandoned palace, Kensington, life went quietly on. The palace was gradually filled up by minor members of the royal family requiring lodgings, including the Duchess of Kent and her daughter Princess Victoria.

Victoria was the unlikely winner of the ‘baby race’ that took place between George III’s numerous sons to provide a legitimate heir to the throne. Although George III and his wife Charlotte churned out fifteen offspring, they had only one legitimate grandchild, named Charlotte. When she died in childbirth in 1817, the king’s younger sons were forced to abandon their various mistresses, marry princesses and set to work at the business of procreation.

The satirical poet Peter Pindar described how ‘Hot and hard each Royal pair/ are at it hunting for the heir’. George III’s fourth son, Edward, Duke of Kent, married a German princess and won the race by producing Victoria in 1819; he and his young family moved into the rooms which had formerly been George II’s private apartments at Kensington.

After the Duke of Kent’s early death, his widow, her household and his daughter crept discreetly upwards and began to colonise the state apartments at the top of the King’s Grand Staircase (the duchess’s brother-in-law, King William IV, was extremely annoyed when he found out). It was in the grand but by now slightly ramshackle environment of William Kent’s rooms for George I that Princess Victoria grew up. It was at Kensington Palace that the sixteen-year-old Victoria first met Albert; it was there that she woke up on the morning in 1837 that she became queen.

Although she promptly moved to Buckingham Palace upon her accession, Victoria retained a certain fondness for her childhood home. In 1897, she decided to open the palace to the public. There was a period of restoration and refurbishment, including a (misguided) application of varnish to William Kent’s King’s Grand Staircase. Then, in 1899, the doors were unlocked and the crowds surged in.

Nineteenth-century visitors climb the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace. You can see William Kent’s portraits of Peter the Wild Boy and Doctor Arbuthnot on the landing just ahead of them