The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I (17 page)

Jonathan Swift beautifully described London’s disorder at dawn:

Now hardly here and there a hackney coach

Appearing shows the ruddy morn’s approach.

Now Betty from her master’s bed had flown,

And softly stole to discompose her own.

The slipshod prentice from his master’s door

Had pared the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor.

Now Moll had whirled her mop with dext’rous airs,

Prepared to scrub the entry and the stairs.

The youth with broomy stumps began to trace

The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place.

The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep,

Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney-sweep.

Duns at his lordship’s gate began to meet,

And Brickdust Moll had screamed through half the street.

The turnkey now his flock returning sees,

Duly let out a-night to steal for fees.

The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands,

And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.
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But in spite of the dirt, the chaos and the din, London was a great and proud city where all desires could be satisfied, if you were lucky or wealthy enough. Otherwise you could find yourself homeless and poverty-stricken, or abandoned in the notorious debtors’ prison, the Fleet.

In 1697 we find the Lord Mayor condemning the annual Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield market as the scene of ‘obscene, lascivious and scandalous plays, comedies and farces, unlawful games and interludes, drunkenness etc’.
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But Londoners loved the fairs. Screams of ‘Show, Show, Show, Show!’ rose from an excitable crowd until the players arrived to entertain them. Spectacles such as rope-dancing, acrobats, music booths, dwarfs and Siamese twins merged with strolling players who performed in plays such as the anonymously authored
The Creation of the World
, with its images of hellfire; the entertainments were accompanied by huge quantities of food and drink – coffee, tea, ale and sucking pigs.

The painter and satirist William Hogarth reveals the chaos and
bawdiness of the fair in his
Southwark Fair
of 1734. An elaborate puppet show, ‘The Siege of Troy’, which was performed at Southwark in 1707, 1715 and 1716, had a huge impact on the young Hogarth. He depicted the show with an enormous picture of a wooden horse hoisted above the players. The actors are performing elaborate spectacles to entice the throng, with one swinging from the stage by a rope; but the crowd, with their grotesque and exaggerated features, have their backs to the stage, interested only in observing one another.

Gambling was ubiquitous among all classes, and the state lottery was a useful way of raising revenue. Even Melusine and Sophia Charlotte bought tickets, and Sophia Charlotte won £10,000 in 1719. Gambling took place either in the streets, adding to the noise and vitality of the city, or in private gaming dens. It was also loved by the aristocracy, and Melusine and George spent many evenings playing cards with their family, friends and courtiers.

Londoners could not get enough of gory spectacles; even public executions served as theatre.
The Chronicles of Newgate
, about London’s notorious prison, records how: ‘The upturned faces of the eager spectators resembled those of the “gods” at Drury Lane on Boxing Night.’

The aristocracy and the well-to-do preferred the pleasures of the stage. Theatres had been closed during the Puritanism of the Interregnum, and on their reopening with Charles II’s restoration performances were sanitized to appeal to the monarch and the wealthy. New theatres were licensed in Drury Lane and Dorset Gardens, and Melusine, George and their daughters were frequent visitors; the theatre was one of the pleasures that reminded them of Hanover.

During George I’s reign theatre remained a pleasant experience, reflecting the taste of the monarch and his mistress. Bonet complained that because George’s understanding of English was poor,
‘ingenious plays are neglected in order to present the spectacle, in the machines, in the dances, the decorations, the farces, and other things which entertain more the senses than the mind’.
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England’s commentators railed against the ‘prodigal subscriptions for Squeaking Italians and capering Monsieurs’ at the expense of the more highbrow English drama.
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But Melusine and George’s greatest delight was the opera, in particular the music of George Frideric Handel, who thrived under the couple’s patronage.

Opera had suffered in the wake of the Jacobite riots, and there were no performances at the King’s Theatre between 1717 and 1719. But it was saved from oblivion by the founders of the Royal Academy of Music, a group of aristocrats and courtiers who established the institution specifically to revive opera on the London stage. George and Melusine were thrilled, with George committing to an annual grant of £1,000.

Opera at the Haymarket was under the direction of the Swiss impresario John James Heidegger. He created such a marvellous display that even sophisticated Londoners used to ‘Show! Show!’ were impressed. Heidegger scoured Italy for the best singers, securing them for astronomical sums; the castrato Francesco Bernard, known as Senesino, would only come for £2,000. His antics both on and off stage thrilled the crowd and filled the newspapers. Heidegger additionally made his theatre the setting of a sumptuous masquerade where the crowd would mingle in their finery and disguises in the glow of candlelight. This was the London that Melusine adored – music, spectacle and wealth. She and Heidegger became friends; in 1728 she leased his house at Barnes, near the river in Richmond, while he travelled to Italy in search of yet more operatic stars.
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The newly created Royal Academy of Music was financed by subscriptions of a minimum of £200, making it the province of the
wealthy. The guidelines of its establishment reflected the contemporary mania for stocks and the resultant bubbles, and many contemporaries compared the fever for opera with the mania created by the catastrophic South Sea Bubble of 1720. Its excesses prompted commentators such as Bishop Berkeley to thunderous diatribes:

Our gaming, our Operas, our Maskerades, are, in spite of our Debts and Poverty, become the Wonders of our Neighbours . . . The Plague dreadful as it is, is an Evil of short duration; Cities have often recovered and flourished after it; but when was it known that a People broken and corrupted by Luxury recovered themselves?
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But despite such ragings, the taste of Melusine and George triumphed. Many, such as Swift and Gay, were appalled. In the winter of 1723 Gay wrote:

There is nobody allowed to say I sing but an Eunuch or an Italian Woman. Every body is grown now as great a judge of Music as they were in your time of Poetry, and folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute about the different Styles of Handel, Bononcini and Attilio. People have now forgot Homer, and Virgil & Caesar, or at least they have lost their ranks, for in London and Westminster in all polite conversations, Senesino is daily voted to be the greatest man that ever liv’d.
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It was only in 1728, a year after George’s death, that John Gay brought his irreverent
The Beggar’s Opera
to the stage, with its vilification of the Whig oligarchy that served George and Melusine so well.

George Frideric Handel was the musician most closely associated with George and Melusine. Like most cultured Germans,
Handel’s influences were primarily Italian. In 1706 he visited Italy and stayed for four years, developing his musical style. By the time he was appointed George’s Kapellmeister in 1710 he was famous, not least for operas such as
Agrippina
, which had premiered in Venice in 1710. Handel spent the next four years in both Hanover and London, where his operas
Rinaldo, Il Pastor Fido
and
Teseo
were raging successes. He was reluctant to leave London for parochial Hanover, where one of his duties was teaching music to the royal grandchildren and Melusine’s daughters; he was saved by the death of Queen Anne. He remained in England for the rest of his life (he was naturalized in 1726), enjoying the favour of the ruling house and the aristocracy. One of his most enduring pieces, the
Water Music
of 1717, written for string and wind instruments, was composed to accompany Melusine and George as they rowed down the Thames. In his biography of London, Peter Ackroyd puts a less romantic twist on this image of the companionship of love in middle age – Melusine and George snuggling to the sounds of Handel’s exquisite composition as they wended their way along the river. Ackroyd suggests the music was performed not to accompany a romantic tryst but to drown out the sounds of the Thames’s foul-mouthed boatmen.

In London Handel’s operas were performed at Vanbrugh’s King’s Theatre on Haymarket. The premieres of the new operas that appeared almost every year were one of Melusine’s chief delights. She enjoyed
Floridante
in 1721,
Ottone
in 1723,
Giulio Cesare
in 1724,
Rodelinda
in 1725 and
Scipione
in 1726.

Melusine and the girls all subscribed to music publications, particularly to Handel’s.
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It was a passion enjoyed by the extended family too. In 1721 we hear of an impromptu concert arranged for George by Sophia Charlotte, to George’s evident delight:

Being one evening at the home of Mademoiselle Schulemburg [probably Louise], niece of the duchess of Kendal, the king sent for him [Bononcini – a musician] to look at the beginning of a pastorale, and he recognized its style [probably Steffani’s]. When . . . [Sophia Charlotte] put on a very private concert of the king in his apartment, which was managed by her servant Brighella, that is, me, we decided to perform this pastorale and thus gave His Majesty a pleasant surprise . . .
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And in 1725 young Melusine interceded for a young Italian singer, Benedetta Sorosina, and managed to find her a small part in Handel’s opera
Giulio Cesare
. By all accounts it was not a very good opera – or perhaps it was a case of professional jealousy – for in January 1725 Giuseppe Riva wrote to Agostino Steffani: ‘Benedetta . . . could not make a great impact, because the arias are mediocre and stuck on, as they say, with spit . . .’
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One of the relatively new institutions that gave London such vibrancy – spreading the gossip and sparking political discourse – was the coffee and chocolate house, informal centres of both relaxation and fierce debate. Coffee-house culture exploded in the eighteenth century, but its beginnings can be found in the seventeenth. Originating in Venice, the first London coffee house was established in 1652 in St Michael’s Alley, near Cornhill, and within five years two more opened nearby, in St Michael’s Churchyard and in Fleet Street. The author of
The Topography of London
noted that ‘theire ware also att this time a Turkish drink to be sould in eury street, called Coffee, and another kind of drink called Tee, and also a drink called Chacolate, which was a very hearty drink.’
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Such was their popularity that they survived Charles II’s attempts in 1675 to eradicate them – he feared that political discussion, so integral to coffee-house culture, would sow discord for his regime. By the time Melusine and George arrived in England there were
roughly two thousand of them. They were cheap – Macaulay observed that you were ‘able to pass evenings socially at a very small charge’. And they were everywhere.

The first edition of the
Spectator
in 1711 wrote of the variety of activities to be pursued in the coffee house:

sometimes I am seen thrusting my Head into a Round of Politicians at Will’s, and listening with great Attention to the Narratives that are made in those little Circular Audiences. Sometimes I smoak a Pipe at Child’s, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the Post-Man [a newspaper commonly found in coffee houses] overhear the Conversation of every Table in the Room. I appear on Sunday Nights at St James’s Coffee-House, and sometimes join the little Committee of Politicks in the Inner Room, as one who comes there to hear and to improve. My Face is likewise very well known at the Grecian, the Cocoa-Tree . . .
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Individual coffee houses became synonymous with different professions. Surgeons would congregate in one, lawyers in another, artists and writers in another, brokers in yet another. Some attracted Whigs, others Tories. One particular coffee house – The Chapter – even attracted members of the clergy. And the London Stock Exchange grew out of the coffee-house culture: brokers were accustomed to frequenting the coffee houses in Change Alley. When establishments such as Jonathan’s became too noisy to effectively conduct business, they moved to New Jonathan’s – renamed the Stock Exchange in 1773.
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They were unofficial clubs without the fees, darting in and out of fashion. They were not particularly comfortable and they stank of tobacco, but they were excellent meeting places, profitable places of business, and they made London into a particularly sociable city. In the words of Macaulay, ‘the coffee house was the Londoner’s home, and . . . those who
wished to find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.’
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