Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  What on earth was the point of such trivia? The surprising truth is that etiquette could be used to make a court career, or to break it. It was a clear indicator of status. Being treated with ceremonious respect could raise one’s credit immeasurably, while an absence of ceremony could be terribly wounding. The modern historian Bob Bucholz calls court etiquette ‘a weapon in the arsenal of the monarchy, as potent as any polemic or art; more flexible and subtle than any army or navy’.52

  And so it was only when alone that the courtiers could whistle, loosen their garters or loll in an easy chair. Any of these things when done in company Lord Chesterfield thought ‘injurious to superiors, shocking and offensive to equals, brutal and insulting to inferiors’.53 Chesterfield definitively summed up the sterile and inhuman side of court life when he condemned even ‘frequent and loud laughter’ as being fit only for the London mob.

  He was full of smug self-satisfaction when he claimed – so pitifully – that nobody had ever heard him laugh.54

  Peter the Wild Boy, of course, ignored this curious nonsense. He seemed to settle down in this strange new world without a care, meeting its probing gaze with his own roving eyes and laughter. His gusts of giggles rang through the palace, as did his equine neighs and his merry, if wordless, songs.

  *

  As time went on, though, the Wild Boy was gradually forced into new and unnatural behaviours, and began to show signs of distress. The first time Peter saw someone undressing, he was ‘in great pain’, thinking the man was peeling the very skin off his leg when he removed his stockings.55 He hated clothes, but the courtiers made him wear one of his two new suits – one blue, the other green – with red stockings.56 His dressers had enormous trouble in getting Peter’s suits on and off, and they seemed ‘extremely uneasy to him’. As well as the daily struggle over his clothes, Peter could not be made ‘to lie down on a bed, but sits and sleeps in a corner of the room’.57 Nor did he understand the use of a chamber pot and ‘foul’d himself, without offering to do otherwise’.58

  It was like trying to dress a dog, frustrating to both parties. But these poignant details of a little boy bewildered really pierce the heart.

  Peter’s new suits were like straitjackets to him, and gradually his clothes changed his very posture. His tight court coat, cut much more restrictively than a modern jacket, meant that ‘crawling or scrambling about, would now be more troublesome to him, than walking upright’.59 Eighteenth-century court garments were designed to make the wearer stand up straight – shoulders lowered, chest puffed out, toes turned out – and they began to do their work upon the Wild Boy.

  In time Peter grew fond of his fine clothes. He’d always liked the gleam of gold, and if a courtier was wearing ‘anything smooth or shining in his dress’, he would spot it at once and ‘shew his attention by stroaking it’.60 He also learnt to pick pockets, from the most innocent of motives: ‘if he finds nuts or fruits, he is very glad of them’.61 Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet about Peter concluded with a spoof advert ‘to warn all ladies and gentlemen who intend to visit this Wild Man’ not to carry anything ‘indecent’ in their pockets, as he’d inevitably whip it out and embarrass them.62

  This was charming and amusing. But when Peter stepped over the invisible line that defined acceptable behaviour, he was beaten on the legs with a ‘broad leather strap to keep him in awe’.63 His shock and confusion can only be imagined. Everyone was fascinated by the idea of the Wild Boy, but it seemed that no one really cared for the human child.

  He began to pine for a return to the woods.

  *

  Eventually, a turning point came during a dinner at the king’s table. George I invited Peter to taste any of the many dishes upon the table, but the Wild Boy threw his food about and refused to touch meat. He’d only eat ‘asparagus, or other garden-things’.64 Exasperated, the king ordered that Peter should be given the food he preferred, but also commanded that the Wild Boy should embark upon a course of ‘instruction as may best fit him for human society’.65

  Now Peter the Wild Boy was fortunate enough to find a friend. He was ‘committed to the care of Dr Arbuthnot’, one of the king’s physicians, in order to be taught to speak and be ‘made a sociable creature’.66 According to the rationalists at court, a little application would bring certain success, and Peter would become fully human at last.

  The brilliant Dr John Arbuthnot. ‘Inattentive in company’, his ‘imagination was always at work’

  Dr John Arbuthnot is yet another of the figures depicted in William Kent’s staircase at Kensington Palace. He’s the elderly man in a plain brown coat standing just behind Peter. (This portrait was usually known as the ‘Mysterious Quaker’ before his real identity was deduced.) Dr Arbuthnot would now prove himself to be a credit to his profession: gentle, caring and humane.

  Born in Scotland in 1667, he’d trained at the Marischal College in Aberdeen before heading south, studying mathematics and becoming Queen Anne’s physician in 1709. As well as being an eminent scientist, he was also a member of the witty and iconoclastic society of writers called the Scriblerus Club. His friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were also members.

  In Dr Arbuthnot’s best-known satirical book, The History of John Bull, the grumpy Everyman character John Bull personifies the English people: red-faced, beer-drinking, plain-speaking, Frenchman-hating. Yet Dr Arbuthnot’s jokes were gentle rather than savage, ‘like flaps of the face given in jest … no blackness will appear after the blows’.67 Despite his talent and appetite for satire, he always managed to avoid giving offence. Unusually, he managed to remain ‘in great esteem with the whole court’ as a philosopher, a mathematician and a ‘character of uncommon virtue and probity’.68

  It’s a relief to find that Dr Arbuthnot did have at least one imperfection of character: he was hopelessly addicted to cards. Despite all the hours of practice he put in, he remained a dreadful player. On one renowned occasion, which gave much amusement to his friends, he played two games of quadrille against a dog and was still ‘most shamefully beaten’.69

  And he also had some kind of physical problem with his legs. One friend joked that Dr Arbuthnot was ‘a man that can do everything but walk’, which he did with ‘a sort of slouch’.70 Indeed, on the King’s Grand Staircase, William Kent painted the doctor leaning upon his indispensable stout stick.

  The Scottish doctor was given ‘an apartment joining’ onto Peter’s at the palace, and together they began the process of civilisation.71 The Wild Boy had daily lessons in language and manners. His progress was slow and painful, as he had ‘a natural tendency to get away if not held by his coat’.72

  Yet it doesn’t sound as if Dr Arbuthnot was capable of a sustained campaign of terror. ‘Inattentive in company’, his ‘imagination was always at work’ and his mind frequently wandered off the topic at hand.73 Even the satirists allowed that he had shown ‘care, skill and tenderness’ in trying to tame the Wild Boy.74

  Opinion was divided about whether Dr Arbuthnot was successful or not. Peter did indeed learn how to ‘pronounce and utter after his tutor words of one syllable’ and, like a performing dog, he learnt a few social graces: he could kiss his fingers and bow.75

  Yet others thought that Dr Arbuthnot had failed, despite all his efforts, and that Peter still retained ‘the natural wildness in all his actions and behaviour’.76 And Peter would never really engage with other people through language, thereby disappointing all the earnest supporters who wished him well. Even with the advantage of hindsight, it’s not exactly clear what Peter’s condition was. It is likely that he was autistic, but medical opinion cannot agree upon whether he was born with his condition and abandoned in the woods by a mother who thought him defective, or whether he became the way he was because of an early family tragedy which left him completely alone and without social stimulus.

  Unlike many others, Dr Arbuthnot remained absolutely convinced that Peter the Wild Boy did indeed have a soul. Despite the slow ebbing of the court’s
confidence that Peter would ever learn to speak, Dr Arbuthnot kept faith with his pupil. He arranged for Peter to be baptised at his own home in Cork Street.77

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  Peter the Wild Boy made his first appearance in George I’s drawing room on 7 April, and he’d been promised to Princess Caroline soon afterwards. We left Caroline waiting in vain for the arrival of her new servant, for the king and court were reluctant to let Peter go. And the king showed no great generosity towards the princess, who had stood so firmly by her husband during the quarrel of recent years. He treated her respectfully, but ‘he never cordially loved her’.78

  Now aged forty-three, Caroline had become a meaty mountain of a woman. The fame of her prodigious bosom was so great that some people were actually disappointed by its reality. ‘The Princess is really a good fine woman,’ one visitor to the court wrote to a country neighbour, but ‘her breasts they make such a wonder at I don’t think exceed Mrs Abell’s in size’.79

  It was 16 April 1726 before Jonathan Swift could report that he had been to Princess Caroline’s house in Leicester Square and had found Peter in residence there at last. (Swift sourly joked that he’d only received his own invitation to Leicester House because Princess Caroline, obsessed with the ‘wild Boy from Germany’, also ‘had a curiosity to see a wild Dean from Ireland’.80)

  Caroline’s genuine curiosity about odd people and strange things stemmed from both her background and character. She’d been born in the sleepy German principality of Ansbach, orphaned early and adopted by the court of Prussia. While her formal education was very poor, she did at least in her youth make friends with the rationalist philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. He introduced her to the world of ideas (and would develop his celebrated calculating machine while librarian to the Hanoverian court).

  Although Caroline lacked a dowry, she was placed upon the European marriage market for princesses, and the Catholic courts of Europe were baffled when she dithered about accepting a flattering matrimonial offer from the future king of Spain.

  Leibniz went against the trend in noting that ‘every one predicts the Spanish crown for her, but she deserves something surer than that’.81 In fact, Princess Caroline was deeply reluctant to make the conversion to Catholicism necessary for the Spanish match. People reported that ‘First the Princess of Ansbach says “Yes” and then “No”. First she says we Protestants have no valid priests, then that Catholics are idolatrous and accursed.’ There were reports that the Jesuit tasked with converting her frequently argued Caroline into tears.82

  Eventually, the Spanish match was off. Princess Caroline won much respect for her resolute Protestantism, and people praised her for having ‘scorn’d an empire for religion’s sake’, as John Gay put it.83 She would remain a lifelong religious radical, more intrigued by the twists and turns of religious doctrine than by stolid service to the established church.

  A little later she was wooed again, this time by Prince George Augustus (then of Hanover). He began his campaign of courtship incognito before declaring his hand and being accepted. The court of Hanover was delighted with his choice, and there were ‘many healths drunk’ to the engaged couple in 1705.84

  Caroline had always been ‘a most entertaining companion’, an autodidact fonder of speaking than writing.85 Her effusive but illegible letters, written in French, are terribly difficult to decipher, and her husband complained that she wrote ‘like a cat’.86 Always in too much of a hurry, Caroline would scribble ‘asteur’ when she meant ‘à cette heure’; ‘Harriet Campbell’ became ‘hariet cambel’, and ‘Isabella Finch’ became ‘belle fintzche’.87 Her friends agreed that she spelt very badly, ‘but then she taught herself to write, so it’s no wonder’.88

  Palace parties were often tedious and depressing to this princess who liked to talk philosophy. She was a stalwart supporter of Sir Isaac Newton, despite his epic row with her other pet philosopher Leibniz about which of them had discovered calculus. She admired Newton tremendously and told ‘the whole circle’ in the drawing room that she was honoured to have lived in the same age as such a great man.89

  The less-than-charitable thought Princess Caroline’s philosophical fancies were pretentious, and they scoffed at her for ‘pretending to understand the metaphysicks of Leibniz’.90 But her critics didn’t understand that she was successfully following a German rather than a British pattern for royal females. By taking culture seriously, Caroline was admirably fulfilling the job description of an eighteenth-century queen as it existed in the German states. There it was expected that the female half of a royal couple would lead the social life of a court, welcome guests and sparkle in erudite conversation, and Princess Caroline came from a grand tradition of clever, lively women who had ignited the courts of Germany.91

  The dying words of Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, George I’s sister, summed up their intellectualism and what can best be described as their tolerance rather than enjoyment of conventional court life: ‘Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me. As for the King, my husband,’ she nonchalantly added, ‘well, I shall afford him the opportunity of giving me a magnificent funeral, and displaying all the pomp he loves so much.’92

  These were the role models that Princess Caroline followed, steeper, braver paths to climb than those conventionally chosen by English princesses.

  And as well as clucking over the intellectuals who congregated in her drawing room, she was also a good mistress to her servants: wise, witty and maternal.

  *

  So the Wild Boy eventually found himself part of the prince and princess’s household in Leicester Fields, discovering a snug place under Caroline’s wing. Dr Arbuthnot continued to visit his pupil and would also drop in on his friend Henrietta Howard. (She thought he didn’t come often enough, and when he tried to make an exit he would find himself ‘prettily chid for leaving’.93) Leicester House remained a magnet for everyone and anyone talented or droll. The reversionary interest still ensured that the ‘most promising of the young lords and gentlemen’ and the ‘prettiest and liveliest of the young ladies’ were to be found there.94

  As we already know, gaiety and glamour were brought to Princess Caroline’s household by the Maids of Honour. A previous, promiscuous generation of Maids had liberally bestowed their favours ‘to the right and to the left and not the least notice taken of their conduct’.95 At the very creation of Princess Caroline’s household in 1714, equerry Peter Wentworth noted that the town had ‘named four beauties for Maids to her Highness’, rightly predicting that the princess’s husband would be ‘very sociable’ among them and that there’d be trouble if Caroline herself had ‘any spice of jealousy’.96

  The older, colder members of the court constantly complained about the Maids of Honour’s ‘little levities’: an obsession with the new dresses to be worn on the king’s birthday, with novels and romances, and with infuriating ‘merry pranks’ played late at night.97 ‘People who are of such very hot constitutions as to want to be refresh’d by night-walking’, ran one complaint, ‘need not disturb others who are not altogether so warm as they are.’98

  Princess Caroline’s Maids of Honour included the flighty and selfish Sophy Howe. Naughty and saucy Sophy was quick to exploit – and indeed to abuse – the relaxed atmosphere of the junior court. When told off for giggling in chapel by the Duchess of St Albans and being informed that ‘she could not do a worse thing’, Sophy pertly (but truthfully) answered, ‘I beg your Grace’s pardon, I can do a great many worse things.’99

  One of these ‘worse things’ took place on the evening when Sophy and the Duchess of Marlborough had too much to drink at dinner. ‘“Lady Duchess, let us do something odd,” Sophy suggested, “let us make – in the stone passage,” and so they did before all the footmen.’100 The dash is tantalising. We don’t know if they made love or water or simply a spectacle of themselves.

  In Sophy’s letters the Maids of Honour soun
d like pupils at a riotous girls’ boarding school. Updates addressed to her friend Henrietta Howard are full of news about potential partners: during one country visit she wrote that Henrietta would be wrong to assume that there was no flirtation to be had among the provincial gentlemen. But an absence from London meant an absence from the most desirable male matches and made her ‘more sensible than ever’ of her happiness in being a Maid of Honour.101 She was also cruel to her mother and dangerously addicted to the dizzy, giddy side of life at court.

  So the charmed circle of the Maids of Honour generally found their lives cheerful and comfortable. One of their number, belonging to the household of Princess Caroline’s daughter Anne, extolled the conveniences of life in a royal household:

  We have people found us that clean our rooms and wash for us, so there is no expense of that kind; sheets and towels are also found, silver candlesticks, and china, (tea-things, I mean,) and sugar. The Ladies of the Bedchamber and Maids of Honour dine together … we have by much the best table; no allowance of wine, but may call for what quantity and what sort we please: we have two men to wait.102

  This was not a bad life, if you could bear the rules and lack of privacy.

  *

  ‘And who would not go to the Devil, for the sake of dear Molly Lepell?’ (court ballad)

  In defence of the Maids’ philosophy of relentless fun, the former Maid Molly Hervey (neé Lepell) explained that she personally hated ‘to look on the dark side of life’ and would ‘always be thankful to those who turn[ed] the bright side of the lantern’ towards her.103

  Molly had by now left Princess Caroline’s household, having been eventually forced to admit the marriage to John Hervey that disqualified her from her post. Her husband’s elder brother Carr had died in 1723, so John himself was now in line to inherit his family’s titles. Molly remained much at court with her new name of Lady Hervey, but some of her former friends found her less sympathetic than before. Her husband, arch and critical, had begun to taint her with his own bleak cynicism.