Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  A toy boy for the ladies of the court? Poor Peter, the wild child found in the woods

  Now, showing great indulgence, the old king began to play with his new toy. He relished Peter’s refreshing lack of familiarity with the drawing-room world. The courtiers watched, fascinated, as Peter first encountered the fabric of their everyday lives. Princess Caroline encouraged him to try on her glove, and then let him examine ‘the sparkling gems’ on her black velvet gown. Everyone shared Peter’s delight when he discovered her ‘gold watch that struck the hours’, which ‘was held to strike at his ear’.7

  Peter was about as far removed from the other courtiers – in background, in behaviour – as could be possible. He provided amusement for everybody with his comical ways. But his presence also sparked off engrossing philosophical debates, the kind of clever conversations that all courtiers enjoyed from time to time. The occasional intellectual dispute signalled that the British court was sophisticated and superior, a heavyweight contender among the courts of Enlightenment Europe.

  Peter’s very existence raised the fascinating question of what it really meant to be human.

  *

  For Peter, the drawing room at St James’s Palace marked the end of a strange odyssey that had begun in a German forest.

  At George I’s insistence, his court decamped to his birthplace in Hanover every other year for a few carefree weeks of vacation. He summered in the palace of Herrenhausen outside the city, surrounded by its gardens, canals and orange trees. Here, after years of endeavour, the king’s engineers had finally persuaded Europe’s tallest fountain to play. It spurted a joyous thirty-six metres into the air. Here, too, his gardeners in 1726 were planting the arrow-straight avenue that linked the palace to the city of Hanover with a staggering 1,219 new lime trees.

  The king was so proud of his gardens at Herrenhausen that he even let tourists enjoy them too in his absence, just as long as they didn’t disturb the nightingales or throw things at the swans.8

  Peter the Wild Boy also grew up near Hanover, but his childhood was spent deep in the adjacent wild wood of Hertswold.9 His family and early years remain muffled in mystery, and people speculated that he’d been suckled by a she-wolf. One day in 1725, local forest folk found Peter wandering all alone among the trees. A newspaper described how they’d discovered ‘a creature of a real human kind and species, naked and wild’. It seemed that Peter had had no human contact since his infancy, and only his height suggested that he was ‘about 12 or 13 years of age’.10 And he had no words to tell his own story: it was ‘not yet known by what strange fate he came into the wood, because he cannot speak’.11

  There was a general assumption that the Wild Boy had been ‘rescued’ from the wilderness, but the more detailed accounts of his capture reveal that he was actually hunted down like a wild beast. ‘When he was first discovered,’ claimed one of many newspaper articles, he was ‘so wild and savage, as to shun all human kind’, and he could ‘climb up the trees with an agility scarce to be considered’.12 One report described him ‘walking on all fours, running up trees like a squirrel, and feeding upon grass and moss’.13 Perhaps, as another excited journalist claimed, he was first spotted ‘sitting in the hollow of a tree cracking nuts and eating acorns’.14 (As we shall see, acorns would retain a special significance for Peter.)

  He did not leave his freedom readily. As his hunters closed in, Peter tried to hide at the top of a tree, and it had to be felled before he could be captured.15 Once ensnared, Peter was taken to the town of Celle, where he was thrust with the vagabonds and criminals into the ‘House of Correction’.16

  News of Peter and his bizarre, speechless condition rippled out in ever wider circles, and in time reached Herrenhausen and the ears of George I. The king ordered Peter to be brought from the prison to the palace. He took a fancy to the Wild Boy, and decided to make him a member of his household. The king already had Turkish valets, a Polish dwarf entertainer and a menagerie full of rare beasts. This savage half-human from Hanover would strike a further pleasingly exotic note.

  As the royal household began its long journey back across the German states to return to London, it would have been hard to imagine a greater transformation in Peter’s lifestyle. People thought that the Wild Boy was ‘more of the Ouran Outang species than of the human’.17 Many of the other rare creatures previously obtained for the British royal menagerie had died from well-intentioned but misguided treatment: an elephant perished from drinking a gallon of wine a day, and ostriches were fed nails under the mistaken idea that they could digest iron.

  How would the puckish Peter adapt to a new life in captivity?

  *

  Back in the drawing room, the courtiers tried to coach and coax Peter into producing a few halting words. ‘What is your name?’ they asked. He could be drilled into saying ‘Pe–ter’ in reply, but he would always pronounce the two syllables of his name with a short interval between them. ‘Who is your father?’ they asked, and the answer they expected was ‘King George’.18

  At first glance, Peter looked like any other boy, although his hair grew ‘lower on his forehead than is common’.19 Although he went about on his hands and knees, his body was ‘strait and upright, & not hairy’. The most observant noticed that the middle and fourth fingers of his left hand bore the traces of a poorly healed wound, being ‘web’d together like a duck’s foot’. This was a souvenir from his solitary struggle for survival in the woods. People were particularly struck by his demeanour, which wasn’t solemn and stately like the other courtiers: he had ‘a roving look’ in his eyes, and ‘a merry disposition’.20

  Although the courtiers found Peter endlessly fascinating, it was not planned that he should linger long at the king’s court. Princess Caroline ‘loved to see odd persons’, and she had taken a great and instant fancy to the Wild Boy. Now, to please her, the king generously told her that he would present her with Peter as a gift.21

  But it seems that George I was reluctant to keep his promise. Peter’s transfer to Princess Caroline’s household was several times delayed because ‘the King and court were so entertained with him’ and could not bear to give him up.22

  A polite tug of war now began, with the Wild Boy at its centre. On one level he was just a damaged child. On another, he had become a commodity: as a subject for speculation and brainy showing-off, he was a valuable and status-enhancing curiosity.

  Both George I and Princess Caroline wanted Peter, and he became yet another symbol of the rivalry between the two courts.

  *

  The king’s household, headed by a reserved but kindly master, seemed at first to be no bad place for Peter to remain. We have a glimpse of George I as he now was, in old age, through the eyes of another child. The ten-year-old Horace Walpole, Sir Robert’s son, was taken by his mother to see the king. He recollected George I as ‘an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins; not tall’. He wore ‘a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband over all’.23 Horace also passed juvenile judgement upon the king’s mistress Melusine: she was ‘a very tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady’.24

  Even at the age of sixty-five, George I’s hair was still a rich dark brown and only lightly peppered with white. (This same year, 1726, he gave a lock of hair to a courtier-in-waiting at Kensington Palace: wrapped up in a piece of paper, it remains today in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library.25) But his health was declining. Three years ago he had suffered a stroke, collapsing to the floor, where he ‘remained senseless for a full hour’, ‘his wig on one side, and his hat on the other’.26 He made what appeared to be a full recovery afterwards.

  The king had absorbed many more of the customs and attitudes of his British subjects during the twelve years he had now spent on the throne, and his language skills had improved. Even so, a well-worn joke circulated that Sir Robert Walpole, weak in George I’s preferred German or French, had brushed up on the Roman
classics in order to converse with the king.

  Walpole was surely exaggerating when he claimed to have ‘governed the kingdom by the means of bad Latin’, but he did indeed have an interpreter present during his meetings with the king, and George I’s linguistic limitations remained very trying to his household.27

  It was considered essential that the Lutheran-born king should support the Anglican Church, but he found the weekly services a particular trial. One story goes that he’d developed a habit of chatting with the German-speaking Dr Younger, Dean of Salisbury, during the sermons in the Chapel Royal, which were incomprehensible and boring to him. This was thought ‘indecorous’ and ‘excited much offence’. The solution hit upon was to ban the dean from the palace and to inform the king that he’d been killed by an accidental kick from a horse. George I was deeply affected by the news. Many years later, to his amazement, he encountered Dr Younger still alive and well and living in Salisbury.28

  Despite his continued image problems, George I had nevertheless begun to win some quiet appreciation for his consistent and solid work as sovereign. His hard graft at the business side of kingship, if not at its showmanship, had gained him respect if not popularity.29 The chattering classes generally accepted that his abilities were not brilliant, but ‘no man will presume to say they were contemptible’.30 People were beginning to learn that his reserve stemmed not from pride, but from ‘modesty, caution and deliberation’. And while he may have been reserved in company, Mustapha and Mohammed knew that there was nobody ‘more free among his nearest servants’.31

  Injured pride, though, or perhaps a legitimate fear about the threat to his authority still prevented the king from genuinely warming to his son.

  The refurbishment of the state apartments at Kensington was very nearly complete by 1726. That year brought change at the Office of the King’s Works. Just two days after Peter the Wild Boy’s first appearance in the drawing room in April came the death of the curmudgeonly Sir Thomas Hewett, former chief of the Office. He died a disappointed man at his Nottinghamshire home, his dreams of a new classical architecture unfulfilled.

  William Kent’s numerous friends now used ‘great endeavours’ to get him into the office of Comptroller in the subsequent staff changes, but for once they were unsuccessful. He was made Master Carpenter instead.32 Nevertheless, this was a significant coup. In a remarkable U-turn in his fortunes since he was investigated by the committee of enquiry, the young pretender had become an Office of Works insider.

  Only a few days after Peter the Wild Boy’s first appearance at St James’s, he was taken over to Kensington to sit for Kent’s staircase. Kent decided to hide the boy’s injured left hand, and in his right painted the sprig of oak and acorns that served as a reminder of Peter’s former forest life.

  *

  Outside this microcosm of the world defined by the palace walls, a mania for the Wild Boy had taken off. Londoners now hailed him as ‘the most wonderful wonder’ and ‘one of the greatest curiosities of the world since the time of Adam’.33

  Throughout the centuries, feral children like Peter have aroused feelings of pity, sometimes fear, and a sense of strangeness. Romulus and Remus, wolf-children, monkey-boys or the children imprisoned in kennels or cellars by twisted parents all give us a shudder of ‘the other’.

  Peter could not fail to fascinate the intellectuals then exploring the questions raised by the great revolutionary upheaval in thought generally known as ‘The Enlightenment’. Philosophers were beginning to assert the primacy of reason over superstition, and to challenge the authority of the established church and nobility. They even debated the very definition of a human being, and whether or not people had souls. Peter proved to be a stimulating test case. If he possessed no speech, did he therefore possess no soul? Was he really just an animal? Or was he an admirable and ‘noble savage’ who’d lived a life untainted by society? Jonathan Swift remarked that the subject of the Wild Boy had been ‘half our talk this fortnight’, and Daniel Defoe thought he was the most interesting thing in the world.34

  As a result of his wildfire celebrity, Peter the Wild Boy won the accolade of appearing as a waxwork in Mrs Salmon’s celebrated gallery. Her collection of 140 figures was to be found at the sign of the Golden Salmon in the Strand.35 Mrs Salmon was ‘famed throughout England for her skilful wax modelling’, and visitors could assess her accuracy by comparing her with her own waxwork of herself.36

  Mocking the court and courtiers was already something of an obsession with certain parts of the London media, and the Wild Boy also became wonderful fodder for the city’s satirists. The capital had a vigorous and apparently unchecked popular press, within which both court and Opposition factions had their own publications. The London Gazette reported respectfully on royal activities. In the course of the decade following Peter’s arrival in London, Sir Robert Walpole would spend £50,000 from Secret Service funds in supporting Whig-friendly newspapers.37 Meanwhile, The Craftsman was full of anonymous rants by Opposition politicians, and there were many other occasional publications and pamphlets devoted to jokes, politics and barbed comment of all kinds. Another twenty-five newspapers flourished outside London.38

  One of many newspaper cuttings showing the ‘Wild Youth’. To the right he climbs a tree like a monkey

  The Wild Boy craze caused a new deluge of newspapers and pamphlets to pour off the presses. Few of them were accurate: ‘some inconsistent with themselves, some with possibility, and most of them with fact’.39 The minuscule number of accurate details about Peter’s life were soon distorted or lost.

  While they were ostensibly all about Peter, the real intention behind these publications was to mock the court, the courtiers and even the whole silly race of men.40 The Wild Boy’s lack of worldly knowledge exposed the shallow foundations upon which fashionable society was built. London’s satirists ingeniously invented more and more ludicrous transgressions that Peter was said to have committed: he’d tried to kiss Sir Robert Walpole’s wife; he licked people’s hands in greeting; he wore a hat in the king’s presence; he’d stolen the Lord Chamberlain’s staff.

  This was also the year of the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Mere NATURE Delineated: OR, A BODY without a SOUL. BEING OBSERVATIONS UPON THE Young FORESTER Lately brought to Town from GERMANY. Published on 23 July, this was a wild cadenza of speculation about Peter’s life, situation and encounters with the courtiers. It would be a terrible indictment of the present age, Defoe argued, if the Wild Boy had actively chosen his previous way of life, to ‘converse with the quadrupeds of the forest, and retire from human society’. He was really suggesting that Peter was in fact the only truly sensible person alive.

  And Defoe was sensitive, where the others were not, to the fact that he was using a real and defenceless person, not just a freak, as fodder for his journalism. If he took liberties, he wrote, it was at the expense of ‘our modern men of mode’. Unlike the other journalists, who amused themselves and their readers at Peter’s expense, Defoe showed some humanity towards the boy.

  Peter himself ‘is certainly an object of great compassion’, he acknowledged, ‘and so I treat him all along’.41

  *

  So what were the court ceremonies and absurdities of which Peter was so blissfully unaware?

  How to bow, an art you learnt from your dancing master

  All new courtiers were expected to learn the rules. John Hervey had to endure a ‘lecture of instructions, as to bows, steps, attitudes, & c.’ before taking up the post of Vice-Chamberlain.42 Lord Chesterfield (once again) describes the uncouth gait of those unfamiliar with court etiquette and accoutrements: ‘when an awkward fellow first comes into a room, it is highly probable, that his sword gets between his legs, and throws him down’. Then he drops his hat – twice, probably – and spends a quarter of an hour getting himself back in order again.43

  Peter was supposed to learn to mock idiots such as the ‘country boor’ who did not know what to do with his chapeau-bras: ‘som
etimes he has it in his hand, sometimes in his mouth, and often betrayed a great inclination to put it on his head, concluding that it was a damned troublesome, useless thing’.44

  The Wild Boy also had a shocking tendency simply to sit down when he felt like it, ‘before any one, without distinction of persons’.45 As we know, the drawing room was carefully kept seat-free, ‘there being no chairs in the room lest anyone should be guilty of seating themselves’, and courtier Mary Cowper found a week in waiting made her ‘ill from standing so long upon [her] feet’.46

  It was necessary to bow three times, ‘according to ancient custom’, when passing the vacant royal throne, and at night it was turned to face the wall in order to neutralise its power.47 When the king himself appeared, the whole court sank into ‘a profound reverence or bow’, which he’d acknowledge with a slight nod.48 To leave the king’s presence was a particular challenge to a lady. She could not depart without making three curtseys, and then had to reverse out of the door – all quite a feat in her wide-skirted court mantua and heels. A newly appointed Maid of Honour had to take lessons with a dancing master just to learn how to ‘stand still without tottering’.49 Maids of Honour were punished if they turned their backs upon their mistress, and even more so if they committed the horrible crime of crossing their arms.50

  And it was not possible to leave the royal presence without permission. One lady-in-waiting with a bursting bladder was forced to urinate on the floor, producing a humiliating puddle as big as a dining table which threatened the shoes of bystanders.51