Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  Wentworth had embarked upon his court career in high hope of winning high office. But he suffered from asthma, his progress had stalled, and by the 1720s he stood in sore need of a lucky break. ‘I married young’, he explained in his own defence, ‘& set out in the world with a smaller fortune than I ought.’ He righteously claimed never to have ‘lost any money at play, nor laid out any money upon whores’.3 And yet his money simply seemed to disappear. As well as a wife and numerous children, he also had to support a small country estate in Dorset. It had been a foolish purchase, for the land was ‘miserably worn out by bad tenants’.4 Juliana, his wife, left back in Dorset with their brood, must have had constant call upon the ‘patience and resignation to the will of God’ for which she was celebrated by her friends.5

  The year 1714, and the change of regime, brought with it new opportunities. At the very moment of George I’s landing at Greenwich, Wentworth pushed others aside to welcome the new king. He proudly told his brother that he’d reached out to George I ‘to help him out of the barge, the Duke of Shrewsbury presented me to kiss the King’s hand’.6 This was a valuable coup in Wentworth’s world of constant, cut-throat competition, where success was expressed through the tiniest of details.

  Wentworth thought he ought to be made a Groom of the Bedchamber, the next rank up from his own. ‘I wou’d not be a Querry [equerry] all my life time,’ he chuffed in frustration.7 On 6 August 1714, he appealed to his powerful brother the earl: ‘this day I have taken the oath of office to King George, but I hope to God you’ll get me something better’.8

  John Gay, the former silk mercer’s apprentice who had a secret soft spot for duchesses

  *

  His was a typical ambition, and many, many others likewise nearly broke their hearts during the great mad quest for promotion at court. The struggle for employment, explained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was almost a physical one: ‘there’s a little door to get in and a great crowd without, shoving and thrusting who shall be the foremost’.9

  The jobless and impecunious poet John Gay was even lower on the ladder than Peter Wentworth. A former silk mercer’s apprentice, he haunted the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Leicester House in pursuit of a paid post. Their mutual friends joked that the inept gambler Dr Arbuthnot and John Gay both had unfortunate vices: ‘The Dr. goes to cards, Gay to court; one loses money, one loses his time.’10

  Gay wrote a poem about the monotonous evenings devoted to chasing the remote hope of a court job. He always found it hard to get up from his writing desk in good time, and had to dress in high haste before pressing ‘through the crowd of needy courtiers’:

  Pensive each night, from room to room I walk’d,

  To one I bow’d, and with another talk’d;

  Enquir’d what news, or such a lady’s name,

  And did the next day, and the next, the same.

  Places, I found, were daily given away,

  And yet no friendly Gazette mention’d Gay.

  I ask’d a friend what method to pursue;

  He cry’d, I want a place as well as you.11

  Gay planned to better himself by dedicating a new book (his celebrated Fables) to Princess Caroline’s son; by dining ‘daily with the Maids of Honour’; by promiscuously sucking up to more important people.12 ‘Mr Gay was your servant yesterday,’ wrote Alexander Pope to a female friend; ‘I believe to-day he may be Mrs Lepell’s.’13

  Gay received some insightful advice from a court insider, his friend Henrietta Howard. She fondly chided him for his futile search for office and told him to exercise his true talents as a writer, rather than following his snobbish dreams. ‘Your head is your best friend,’ she told him. ‘It wou’d clothe, lodge and wash you but you neglect it, and follow that false friend your heart.’14

  Back in 1714, Peter Wentworth, likewise dangerously seduced by the glamour of the court, found himself in stomach-churning suspense about the appointment of the Grooms of the Bedchamber. But despite his acute analysis of the characters of everyone around him, Wentworth’s colleagues tended to sideline someone with so little visible self-confidence. ‘A modest merit, with a large share of impudence’ was more certain of success at court than ‘the greatest qualification without it’.15 Not surprisingly, Wentworth found himself overlooked once again when the new Grooms of the Bedchamber were announced.

  Making a resolution at last to act more positively, he selected Baron Görtz, George I’s Hanoverian treasurer, as his counsellor. Wentworth proposed the cheaper and slightly humiliating expedient of being made ‘Groom Extraordinary’ while retaining his lower salary as an equerry.16

  Baron Görtz now assured Wentworth that if there were to be a ‘Groom Extraordinary’, the job would indeed be his, but that there were no plans for appointing one at present. Wentworth just had to wait.

  *

  Peter Wentworth’s contemporary, Thomas Burnet, had an even more gruelling tale of desire and delay. He spent a whole tedious half-decade at court without employment, seeking a job simply by hanging round in the drawing room every single day. If a man ‘can hold out five years’, Burnet calculated, ‘tis morally impossible he should not come into play’.

  These five years were costly, both financially and emotionally. Burnet complained constantly about ‘this cursed Court attendance’. ‘I confess I am pretty heartily tired of it,’ he groaned.17 If he failed to get a job, he thought, he would have wasted ‘half of the very flower of his life’ standing waiting outside a door.18

  Still, Thomas Burnet was eventually rewarded with ‘much a better thing’ than he’d ever hoped for: the offer of the position of British consul in Lisbon.19

  And John Gay, too, was finally offered a job. Princess Caroline had by now given birth to seven surviving children. While her three elder daughters remained with her father-in-law, the king, the youngest three children lived with her at Leicester House. The proffered post was in the tiny fledgling household of the very youngest daughter, and even Gay was affronted by its insignificance. He decided that this most obscure backwater of the court was beneath his notice. Despite its salary of £200 a year, he eventually declined the office of Gentleman Usher to the baby Princess Louisa.

  His friends worried about his rashness in refusing, saying that he had just as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty or the loss of his admirers as a girl of fifteen.20 Yet this eventual curdling of his court hopes did Gay a world of good. He was forced to stop loitering about the palace and to seek theatrical success in the city outside.

  But Peter Wentworth’s wait was not to have such a happy ending. He subsequently found out that Baron Görtz had betrayed him. Despite the baron’s reassurances, the post of ‘Groom Extraordinary’ did indeed exist, but it had been offered to and accepted by someone else ten days earlier. The treacherous Görtz was no friend, and Wentworth should have known ‘he that holds a courtier by the hand, has a wet eel by the tail’.21

  In his letters to his brother, Wentworth’s bewildered pain leaps from the page. ‘I have an innate horrid quality of an unaccountable foolish bashfulness,’ Wentworth sighed in low moments.22 He lacked the knack of making friends, as well as that of making money. By 1726, he was growing old in his search for a better job.

  And he was becoming ever more dangerously devoted to the cure for his ‘foolish bashfulness’, a cure that came in a bottle.

  *

  Peter Wentworth had the kind of in-between status that allowed him to roam at will throughout Kensington Palace, both in the state apartments at the top of the stairs and in the extensive servants’ quarters at the bottom. He happened to be on duty as equerry during George I’s first-ever visit to Kensington and ‘walked all over the gardens with him, and after all over the lodgings, both which he lik’t very well’.23

  Courtiers enjoying themselves by the Round Pond to the east of Kensington Palace in 1736

  Despite his setbacks, Wentworth was obviously still very close to the king on a regular basis, which gave him dail
y the chance to shine and, maybe, to rise. ‘I’ll rouse up my drowsy spirits,’ he promised himself, ‘double my diligence, & by the Grace of God am willing & ready to bustle thro’ this bad world.’24

  And while his position may have been lowly, Wentworth had one huge advantage over the absent Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline: close contact with the couple’s captive daughters.

  At Kensington Palace, he would often have encountered these girls, the king’s granddaughters, coming from a lesson in their ‘learning room’ or going out to ride.25 After the ‘christening quarrel’, these three girls were never returned by George I to their parents’ care.

  The eldest, Princess Anne, now aged seventeen, was ‘very pale, and would be good-looking were she not marked by small-pox’.26 The disease had struck in April 1720, at the very height of the ‘christening quarrel’. At the time, the king had informed Princess Caroline through Mohammed that she could visit her daughter, but that she was not to bring a doctor as he’d made his own medical arrangements.27 Whatever these arrangements were, Anne survived but was severely scarred.

  Anne was born in Hanover. Like the rest of the courtiers she’d become multilingual, speaking ‘German and French to perfection’. She also knew ‘a great deal of history and geography’, spoke English ‘very prettily’ and danced ‘very well’.28 Conscious of a girl’s inferior position, she was overheard wishing that she had no brothers and claiming that ‘I would die tomorrow to be queen to-day!’29

  Next in line after Anne came Amelia, aged fifteen in 1726. When Amelia too fell ill, Princess Caroline was desperate with worry about her daughter’s treatment and furious with the king’s medical staff. She complained that Dr Bussier had wanted ‘to give [Amelia] a vomit of Hypococyana. I tremble at that … My fears & the opposition I meet with are endless,’ she wrote, ‘these animals have propos’d a flannel shift to make her sweat.’ And of the physician who suggested it: ‘I believe I could … have pull’d out his eyes.’30

  Amelia was ‘a handsome blonde with charming features’, and possessed ‘much the prettiest person’ of the whole family.31 But she also had rather more acidity and intelligence than was quite appropriate in a Georgian princess, and suffered for it. She developed a reputation for being gruff and outspoken, for being overfond of music, for scandalously attending chapel ‘in riding clothes with a dog under her arm’.32

  Amelia’s sharp tongue could be devastating, and one courtier complained that she told people just as many ‘shocking things to their faces’ as ‘disagreeable ones behind their backs’.33 However, her friends thought that Amelia (or ‘Emily’) had a character improved by her bluntness: one of the ‘oddest princesses ever known’, she had ‘her ears shut to flattery, and her heart open to honesty’.34

  The third daughter, Caroline, named for her mother, was at thirteen a placid and prematurely maternal character, ‘very tall and stout, and looks like a woman’, with ‘very dark hair’.35 She was the quietest and most conscientious member of the family. During the frequent fiery rows between her sisters, people would call for an intermission: ‘stay, send for Caroline, and then we shall know the truth’.36

  Anne, Amelia and Caroline’s brother Frederick still remained in Hanover as the family’s representative in the German part of their dominions. Their three younger siblings – William Augustus, five, Mary, two, and Louisa, eighteen months – remained with their mother at Leicester House. Through daily contact these younger children won a warm place in their parents’ hearts, hearts that the absent children would never quite recapture.

  For centuries royal children had been parted from their parents for their education and their health. Yet the eighteenth century saw the rise of a new, more compact, more affectionate family unit; parents and children were starting to spend more time together. This rise of bourgeois family values applied even to royalty, and kings all over Europe began to think of themselves as the figureheads of close-knit families as well as of nations.37 Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline actively wanted to be parents to their elder children, as their concerned letters show, but they were thwarted at every turn. They wanted a family life according to modern, more loving, notions, but it was beyond their reach.

  Despite the care that their grandfather the king took of them, the three older girls also suffered badly from their enforced separation from their parents. On one occasion ‘the poor little things’ sent a basket of cherries to their father, ‘with a message that though they were not allowed to go to him, their hearts, souls and thoughts were with their dear parents always’.38

  They were allowed to see the prince and princess only once a week, and not surprisingly they were often rude to their governess, Lady Portland. Amelia wrote of a certain ‘ugly gouvernante who hastes you always to come away, from people that love your company’.39 Once, the girls were to be moved from Kensington to Windsor Castle, but as usual there was ‘a sort of bustle about it’. When Lady Portland asked Princess Anne to tell her parents about the plan, she flatly refused on the grounds that ‘if she was in their places she should not like to have her child carried about without her consent’.40 So Lady Portland had to break the unwelcome news herself.

  Amelia pined for her parents even more than her sisters. Precocious, intelligent but lacking guidance, she claimed to be ‘mightily tir’d of [her] self’, and was becoming spiky and difficult in a way that would harm her chances of marriage.41

  *

  The girls’ daily timetable as semi-prisoners in their grandfather’s palace at Kensington was monotonous: they rose at seven, prayed, dressed and breakfasted. They walked between eight and nine beneath the noses of the ‘guards & sentinels’ placed around the palace gardens.42 They read to themselves between nine and ten, read aloud between ten and eleven, and then it was time to ‘learn by heart’ until twelve. An hour of prayer was followed by an hour for dinner, and then an hour playing shuttlecocks, an hour of needlework and an hour practising the clavichord or performing with their music teacher, George Frederic Handel.43 Handel also taught the king’s three illegitimate daughters. They too lived at Kensington Palace with their mother, Melusine.

  But the princesses’ lives at Kensington were not entirely unpleasant. They had balls, with ‘all the garden illuminated and music in it and dancing in the Green House and the long Gallery’.44 And they clearly enjoyed their grandfather’s annual birthday celebrations: fine fireworks were fired at ten, and ‘the little Princesses danced till 11’.45

  The girls were certainly not kept short of clothes either. An account by their mother’s Mistress of the Robes records that every winter they each had:

  Two coats embroider’d

  [1] trim’d or rich stuff

  1 velvet or rich silk without.

  3 coats brocaded or damask

  A damask night gown

  Two silk under petticoats trim’d with gold or silver.

  Their summer clothes, issued annually, consisted of:

  3 flower’d coats one of them with silver.

  3 plain or stripped [lustrous silk dresses]

  1 night gown four silk hoops46

  In addition to their clothes, the girls had a new pair of shoes every week, sixteen dozen pairs of gloves a year and plentiful supplies of ‘powder, patches, combs, pins, May dew, quilted caps, band boxes, wax, pens and paper’. Their other expenses included the tuning of their harpsichord and food for their birds. Each princess had a personal staff of five, including a Page of Honour, a Gentleman Usher, a Dresser, a Chambermaid and a Page of the Back-stairs. There was only one thing lacking from all this luxury: they had ‘no certain allowance for ribbons or artificial flowers’.47

  Lady Portland can’t have had an easy time of it, looking after three hostile princesses and thereby earning the lasting enmity of their parents. The Prince and Princess of Wales nursed ‘a most irreconcilable hatred’ towards the woman who saw their daughters more than they did.48

  *

  At Kensington Palace the little
princesses lived around an old courtyard recently rebuilt and renamed ‘Princesses’ Court’ for its new occupants. From it a ‘colonnade of communication’ led to Melusine’s lodgings, and it must often have been used by the king making his frequent visits to his own, strange, self-selected and entirely female family: his legitimate granddaughters, his illegitimate daughters and his mistress.49

  Melusine von der Schulenberg had by now been rewarded for her services as the king’s mistress with the titles of Duchess of Kendal and of Munster. She had a three-storey apartment overlooking the gardens, and George I would visit her there ‘every afternoon from five till eight’.50 Melusine enjoyed a special allowance of yellow wax candles to light the stairs leading to the room in her apartment where ‘his Majesty sups’.51

  Ambassadors guessed that during these evening visits she attempted ‘to penetrate the sentiments of his Britannic Majesty’ at Sir Robert Walpole’s request. But Melusine was not tied to Walpole, and her influence with the king could be bought for money by the highest bidder. The French ambassador assured his own king that in diplomatic business ‘it will be necessary to employ her, though I will not trust her further than is absolutely necessary’.52

  Meanwhile, Sophia Charlotte, the king’s half-sister, had died in 1725. Although she was perhaps the most intellectually curious and cultured member of George I’s inner circle, she was underestimated to the last by the xenophobic British. Until her death, she’d held a weekly supper for her half-brother the king to which writers and wits were invited, occasions that have been overlooked when people describe George I as incurious and unintelligent.53