Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  The baby needed to be christened and godparents chosen. George Augustus and Caroline had already given some thought to the important matter of a godfather to this second son. Now the king intervened. He insisted that they should stand down their previous choice and that the scratchy Duke of Newcastle, the Lord Chamberlain and his own highest court officer, should be invited to do the job instead. The prince and princess were infuriated by this interference in what they saw as their own business.

  Henrietta Howard was an eyewitness to the actual christening ceremony, which took place in Princess Caroline’s bedchamber. On one side of the bed were all of Caroline’s ladies; on the other stood the unwelcome figure of the Duke of Newcastle, the uninvited participant who was only there at the king’s insistence.27

  When the ceremony was complete, feelings boiled over. Prince George Augustus and the Duke of Newcastle had an unseemly and embarrassing verbal spat, and the duke somehow came away with the impression that he’d been challenged by the prince to a duel. In fact, it was a simple matter of a word mispronounced and misunderstood, a result of the Hanoverian habit of mangling the English language.

  *

  Language problems intensified the prejudice and xenophobia that thrived between the German and English factions at court. When the new royal family arrived in London, they’d inevitably brought with them a great number of German courtiers and servants. Not least among them were George I’s German cooks, as he couldn’t stomach English food.

  A German countess caused immense offence by announcing that ‘English women did not look like women of quality’ because ‘they hold their heads down, and look always in a fright, whereas those that are foreigners hold up their heads and hold out their breasts, and make themselves look as great and stately as they can’.

  Lady Deloraine, whose husband served in the Prince of Wales’s household, made a tart reply on behalf of the English: ‘We show our quality by our birth and titles, Madam, and not by sticking out our bosoms.’28

  The English constantly complained that the German inner circle surrounding the king created ‘a court within a court’, with concerns ‘opposite to the true interest of England’.29 While the Germans discreetly pretended to have nothing to do with English affairs, Peter Wentworth the equerry noticed that in reality they were the ones with the power of patronage. ‘From the top to the bottom they have a great stroak,’ he said.30

  Behind closed doors, George I did in fact read English newspapers, receive English guests and take a studious interest in governing his new country. He even learnt to speak halting English, although he made typically German errors in grammar (‘What did they go away for? It was their own faults.’31) But many people chose to ignore this. ‘The King of England’, ran wildly inaccurate reports, ‘has no predilection for the English nation, and never receives in private any English of either sex.’32

  So Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline had learnt to needle the king by loudly and publicly praising the English and their customs. The prince declared that the English were ‘the handsomest, the best shaped, the best natured, and lovingest people in the world, and that if anybody would make their court to him, it must be by telling him he was like an Englishman’.33 He announced that he had not ‘one drop of blood in his veins but what [was] English, and at the service of his new subjects’.34 This was widely welcomed, though in fact his blood was a mixture of German, Scottish and French.

  Yet his claim to be a thorough Englishman was undermined whenever he opened his mouth. Although his English was better than his father’s, it was still far from perfect. He compensated for any mistakes by speaking very loudly, but he’d failed to eliminate his ‘bluff Westphalian accent’.35

  *

  The day following the christening, the king sent messengers to ask his son if there was any truth in the outrageous reports he’d received about the christening and the subsequent quarrel in Princess Caroline’s bedchamber. Was it the case, he asked, that Prince George Augustus ‘had said to the Duke of Newcastle these words: You Rascal I will fight you?’36

  In actual fact there’d been a straightforward linguistic slip. George Augustus didn’t deny that he’d called the duke a rascal, but he answered angrily that he’d said, ‘You Rascal I will find you.’ He had wanted to find, not fight, the Duke of Newcastle, he explained, in order to give him a proper tongue-lashing. The duke’s attendance at the christening had been the last straw in a succession of slights. ‘He has often failed in his respect to me’, the prince ranted to the king’s envoys, ‘particularly on this late occasion, by insisting on standing godfather to my son.’37

  Although this was a silly misunderstanding, the prince would not apologise, and the king would not forgive. After the duke’s continued complaints, George I ordered his son and daughter-in-law to vacate their apartments at St James’s. He was expelling them from the family home.

  *

  Now the friends and servants of Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline found the palace doors literally closed against them. When Henrietta Howard tried to go to work, the Yeomen of the Guard thrust forward their weapons to bar her route.

  ‘What was my astonishment,’ she recollected afterwards. ‘I urged, that it was my duty to attend the Princess,’ but ‘they said, No matter; I must not pass that way’.38

  But there was very much worse to come. When George I gave the order for his son and daughter-in-law to be evicted from St James’s Palace, he excluded from it his grandchildren. The Prince and Princess of Wales’s children, their three young daughters Anne, Amelia and little Caroline, and their new baby boy, were all to stay behind.

  At first George Augustus and Caroline could not believe what they were hearing. But they were astonished and dismayed to discover that under English law a king could indeed demand their children. Unluckily for them, legal precedents were produced to show that a monarch had a perfect right to take control of his heirs.39

  So, at 9 o’clock at night on 2 December 1717, Princess Caroline and Prince George Augustus left St James’s Palace for good. They were forced to forsake their children, who would remain behind at St James’s under the supervision of governesses. Poor Caroline ‘went into one faint after another when her weeping little Princesses said goodbye’.40

  Likewise, the prince could never conceal any emotional distress: ‘so little master of Himself, is our Great Master!’41 He and his wife ‘retired to Lord Grantham’s in Dover Street, in the utmost grief and disorder, the Prince cried for two hours, and the Princess swooned several times’.42 Prince George Augustus’s customary guard of yeomen was withdrawn, and his trips about town would henceforth be unprotected and undignified.

  Outside the palace gates, Londoners observed these events with horror. At the same time, though, they relished the farcical note which had been struck. Newsletter writers gleefully speculated that their services would be much required to elucidate the absurd ‘difference betwixt his Majesty and the Prince of Wales, which so much distracts us at present’.43

  ‘An Excellent New Ballad’ (to be sung to the tune of ‘Chevy Chase’) quickly appeared, describing events at the palace as amusingly shambolic:

  God prosper long our noble King

  His Turks and Germans all

  A woeful christ’ning late there did

  In James’s house befall.

  The balladeer took great pleasure from all ‘this silly pother’, visualising the royal family at their most ridiculous: George I writing to his son with a grey goose quill dipped in gall for ink; Princess Caroline calling out ‘Oh! don’t forget the close-stool’ (or toilet) to her Women of the Bedchamber as they packed to leave.

  Only Caroline’s Maid of Honour Mary Bellenden took events in her stride. On the way out of St James’s Palace, it was said, she jumped merrily down the stairs singing ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’.44 This was a Jacobite song, and by singing it she hinted that the king was falling significantly short of the mark as heir to the Stuarts.

 
The prince and princess’s residence at Lord Grantham’s was only brief, and they found a new home for themselves at Leicester House in Leicester Fields. A spacious seventeenth-century mansion, it was protected from the street by a courtyard and overlooked what would in due course become known as Leicester Square. It was here that Elizabeth of Bohemia, the daughter of King James I, had died, and here that Peter the Great of Russia had stayed during his recent visit to England.

  It was a fine house, admittedly, but it did sit rather close to a row of shops. It was clearly not a palace, and it represented a sad blow to Prince George Augustus’s self-esteem.

  *

  Following the catastrophic christening and the expulsion of his son from the palace, the king insisted that no one could serve both households. The courtiers now had to decide where their allegiance lay. ‘All persons who should go to see the prince and princess of Wales’, ran the royal proclamation, ‘should forbear coming into his majesty’s presence.’45

  This new twist turned the quarrel into something like a popularity contest. How many of the courtiers would support the king, and how many the prince?

  Consternation ensued: ‘our courtiers … look so amaz’d, so thunder-struck, and knew so little how to behave themselves … that they betray’d the mercenary principles upon which they acted’. Those on the prince’s side kept quiet because they feared the king, while the king’s supporters were equally ‘backward to declare themselves’ as one day the prince would have his revenge.46

  Luckily for her husband, Princess Caroline understood the art of cultivating public opinion – or the science of spin – unusually well. She had the good sense to see that the transplanted Hanoverians needed to cultivate their popularity as if it were a tender shoot in constant danger of dying, so she began to pay court to her potential supporters, buttering up the grandest courtiers and radiating kindness to the meanest.47 She made her drawing room warm and welcoming almost to a fault, so that her guests departed ‘wonderfully pleas’d’ with her ‘easy deportment and affability’.48 Meanwhile, when George I tried to hold an assembly at St James’s, Caroline was heard to say that ‘no honest woman would appear at it’.49

  Caroline even made clandestine arrangements to see valued friends on the other side of the divide who felt they could no longer afford to be publicly associated with her. One of her ladies-in-waiting told a nervous would-be visitor to come secretly to the summerhouse in Princess Caroline’s garden ‘by nine a clock in the morning … that nobody may see you’.50

  But Caroline and George Augustus really needed their supporters to express an open commitment by crowding the drawing room at Leicester House. The poet and occasional courtier Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did not shirk her duty and turned up to support the plucky younger generation of rebellious royals. ‘We old beauties’, she wrote, ‘are force’d to come out on show days to keep the [prince’s] Court in countenance.’51 Indeed, people began to say that ‘the Prince’s levées and court increase much’ because ‘we are very fond in this country of forbidden fruit’.52

  While Princess Caroline loyally churned out the hours of endless chit-chat that were required to keep her drawing room happy and humming, it was rather a waste of her talents. Her private apartment was much more like the common room of a university. Behind the scenes, her ‘ardent love of learning’ still drove her to gulp down intellectual conversation during any spare moments in her day. Her private parties were

  a strange picture of the motley character and manners of a queen and a learned woman … learned men and divines were intermixed with courtiers and ladies of the household: the conversation turned upon metaphysical subjects, blended with repartees, sallies of mirth, and the tittle-tattle of a drawing-room.53

  Prince George Augustus, meanwhile, had no time for his wife’s interests and often used to brag about ‘the contempt he had for books and letters’ and ‘to say how much he hated all that stuff from his infancy’.54

  While their drawing room at Leicester House remained comfortably full, the prince and princess nevertheless found themselves paying a terribly high price for their principled stand. It was difficult and sometimes impossible for them to see their daughters and baby son left behind at St James’s.

  Once, when the princesses’ governess refused to allow George Augustus access to his little girls, he ‘flew into such a rage that he would literally have kicked her out of the room if the Princess had not thrown herself between them’.55 Sadly the children’s own interests were sacrificed in this quarrel between their elders. ‘We’ve such a good father and such a good mother,’ one of them said, ‘and yet we are orphans.’ Asked if her grandfather the king often visited them, she replied, ‘Oh no, he doesn’t love us enough.’56

  Gossip about these events could not be contained and began to spill out across all the courts of Europe. ‘The King of England is really cruel to the Princess of Wales,’ wrote the Duchess of Orléans. ‘Although she has done nothing, he has taken her children away from her.’57

  In emotional terms, Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline paid dearly for taking their stubborn stand against the king. They were robbed of their daughters’ childhoods, and they would feel the pain of this for the rest of their lives.

  *

  Worse was soon to come. Early in 1718, George I planned his court’s summer move to Kensington Palace. Set in fields and gardens beyond the edge of London, the palace was rather tumble-down, ‘superior to St James’s, but prodigiously beneath any idea we might form of a royal palace’.58 Nevertheless, it was a more relaxed, attractive and healthy place than the main urban royal residence.

  The king sent ahead the little baby boy George William, whose christening had ignited the argument. Once he was at Kensington Palace, though, the baby developed a cough and ‘straitness of breathing’. After a short illness, he ‘fell into convulsions’ and died.59

  Orders were placed for a pitiful amount of black velvet, just ‘sufficient to cover the coffin’ of a baby.60 His funeral cortège left Kensington Palace at 10 p.m. on 12 February 1718.61

  Given the circumstances, the cause of the child’s death and his post-mortem were of enormous importance. A large team of doctors was drafted in to observe it, including Princess Caroline’s own physician, Sir David Hamilton.62 A draft of the team’s report, written at Kensington Palace, reveals their discussions. It records that upon opening the baby prince’s body, they found ‘a large quantity of water’ inside the head, inflamed viscera and a little heart containing a great ‘polype’, or cyst.

  In the original document at the British Library, the nuanced, considered medical discourse is concluded by another, more politically aware hand. Protecting the king and his medical staff from any accusation of malpractice, it finishes firmly: ‘it appears above all that it was impossible that this young prince could live’.63

  Princess Caroline was nevertheless utterly distraught. Perhaps if she had swallowed her pride and ended the quarrel, her infant son would still be alive, or would at least have died in her care.

  ‘My God!’ wrote Prince George Augustus’s great-aunt in Paris:

  How I pity the poor dear Princess of Wales! She saw him [her son] at Kensington Palace just before the end. I wish she hadn’t seen him, for it will be even more painful for her now. God grant that this Prince’s death may extinguish all the flames kindled at his christening! But alas, there is no sign of that yet. God forgive me, but I think the King of England doesn’t believe that the Prince of Wales is his son, because if he did he couldn’t possibly treat him as he does.64

  Parting a mother from her tiny baby appears to be outrageously callous, a ridiculously exaggerated retribution for the king to exact for a petty breach of etiquette. But in fact the ‘christening quarrel’ took place against a much more profound psychological background. Deep in the murky forest of possible motives for the hatred between king and prince there lies the mysterious matter of the missing queen.

  During the drawing-room parties of the
1710s and 1720s, there was a conspicuous gap by George I’s side. His wife, Prince George Augustus’s mother, was completely absent from the court scene at St James’s. She was still alive, and perfectly well, but had long been imprisoned in a remote German castle. Her sad story was bound to have affected the emotions of both her husband and son.

  During George Augustus’s early years in Hanover, his mother Sophia had embarked upon a prolonged, flagrant and ultimately doomed affair with Philip von Königsmarck, a Swedish count then serving in the Hanoverian army. Some of his passionate letters to Sophia survive. On 19 July 1693, he described his memory of ‘dying’ (or having an orgasm, ‘la petite mort’) in her eyes, and of her calling out to him, ‘My dear König, let’s do it together!’65 By one dubious means or another, these letters would in due course come to be revealed to the drawing rooms of Europe.

  Their grand passion came to a dark and horrible end. One night in 1694, Königsmarck was making his way towards Sophia’s room through the shadowy corridors of the riverside Leine Palace at the heart of the old city of Hanover. Suddenly he was ambushed, set upon and strangled. An Italian assassin, assisted by three members of the court, did the dirty deed.66 They disposed of his body by throwing it into the river.

  The whole of the Hanoverian court was grimly united in its silence on the matter, especially when increasingly far-fetched and lurid rumours began to circulate, such as the story that the remains of a skeleton wearing Königsmarck’s ring had been discovered during building work at the palace.67

  Because she had been indiscreet with her lover, Sophia’s affair was a matter of state interest, and her trial swiftly followed. While she was relieved to be divorced from her hated husband, she was less happy when he had her placed under house arrest at the distant castle of Ahlden. She was also denied access to her son, Prince George Augustus. He had only been eleven when his mother disappeared, but we know that her fate still darkened his thoughts.