Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  At least Caroline had other interests and hobbies to provide distraction and comfort, and at Kensington Palace these included her wonderful cabinet of curiosities. This was a room that in Germany might have been called a Wunderkammer, like the one assembled by George II’s grandmother at the Hanoverian palace of Herrenhausen. An inventory of the contents of Caroline’s curiosity museum at Kensington shows that it contained bizarre treasures such as a crystal cup containing a humming bird, ‘two small unicorns’ horns’ and drawers full of vintage medals ‘apt to jump out of their places’ when opened.156

  She constructed an even more grandiose exhibition of marvels and relics from the past in the gardens at Richmond, her country home. Here William Kent built her a curious chamber known as ‘Merlin’s Cave’, and she filled it with waxworks of characters from ancient times. Caroline charmed the courtiers with her fondness for British antiquity, joking that ‘she was always v. angry with the English when she was reading their history to see how violent and raging they were against one another’.157 Her husband, of course, had no time for this whimsical activity and told her that she ‘deserved to be abused for such childish silly stuff’.158 Nevertheless, it was here, in her wonderland at Richmond, that Caroline enjoyed the historical and intellectual pursuits that were balm for her soul.159

  She even went so far as to procure a real live hermit, Stephen Duck, the so-called Thresher Poet, to live at Richmond. Once his literary gift was discovered, he was plucked from an obscure life as a rural labourer, forced to leave behind his family and brought to settle in the gardens as a royal pet. Unfortunately the forced transplantation was not a success, and he later committed suicide.160 And another human oddity likewise spent part of his time down at Richmond. The accounts of the money expended at Caroline’s residence there include payments ‘for the maintenance of Peter the Wild Boy’.161

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  Some of the most intense scenes in the breakdown of the eccentric but enduring love triangle between George II, Caroline and Henrietta were played out between the two women in the bedchamber, during the queen’s toilette.

  George II and Caroline submitted with good grace to the dressing ceremonies expected of monarchs, and their bedchambers were opened daily to the court. George II allowed the senior members of his household to dress him of a morning, and then in surged the ‘gaping crowd’ for the meeting, greeting and business talk that comprised the official levee.162 From 1714, Henrietta had served Caroline as a Bedchamber Woman, an honour paid for with difficult and sometimes demeaning duties.

  When the Ladies of the Bedchamber had renounced their obligation to do real work, they’d nevertheless tried to maintain their right of access to Caroline’s bedroom. Some of them were quite astoundingly persistent. Caroline’s recovery from the birth of a stillborn son in November 1716 was made no easier by one such quarrel about access. Despite the fact that the princess was desperately ill, the Countess of Manchester was adamant that her position still entitled her to enter. Her insistence on such a thing at such a time incensed even the etiquette-obsessed court: ‘everybody knew she was a fool’.163 But on normal occasions the courtiers were absolutely convinced that such trivia were indeed matters of life and death.

  The position of Bedchamber Woman was not physically demanding, but the long hours of waiting, the boredom and the necessity for total self-possession took their toll. Molly Lepell once said that ‘the life of a Maid of Honour was of all things the most miserable’ and she ‘wished that every woman who envied it had a specimen of it’.164 Both jobs could often be quite mind-bendingly tedious.

  In fact, these posts in the royal household, once the pinnacle of aspiration, were slowly declining in terms of prestige. With the passing of greater power to Parliament the court was gradually becoming a backwater, and the ambitious no longer vied for the great court offices such as Groom of the Stool. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the offices would become something of a joke.165 Reformer John Wade in 1831 had quite a rant upon the subject: ‘to what public purport … are the offices of groom of the stole, master of the hawks, master of the buck-hounds, master of the horse, or grooms and lords of the bedchamber?’ He thought them merely ‘menial offices, and unbecoming to the dignity of a nobleman’.166 Indeed, in 1837, a quiescent House of Commons heard that no Groom of the Stool was to be appointed to the new household of Queen Victoria. The only recorded comment heard in the House was ‘a laugh’ at the very idea.167

  Henrietta, though, belonged to a generation that still broadly considered personal service to the monarch to be honourable and valuable.

  But her duties were made more than usually onerous by the psychological background to her employment. If anyone mentioned her role as royal mistress in Caroline’s presence, the queen sharply rebuked the speaker and reminded him or her that he or she ‘was speaking of the King’s servant, and to the King’s wife’.168

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  So Henrietta went every morning to Caroline’s bedchamber to help the queen prepare for the day. Her duties did not include the bringing of water and the emptying of the chamber pot, jobs which were done by the ‘necessary women’. (They were reimbursed for their mops, brooms and brushes in addition to their wages.169) The use of chamber pots at court was not necessarily restricted to private moments: the French ambassador’s wife, for example, was notorious for the ‘frequency and quantity of her pissing which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of witnesses’.170

  Henrietta did have to hold the basin of water while Caroline washed, beginning with her teeth. The current method was to use ‘a soft spunge and warm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times’.171 Rather repulsively for Henrietta, ‘The basin takes whatever comes/ The scrapings of her teeth and gums.’172 Of course, tooth decay could not be avoided completely. Poor Princess Anne’s new husband, William of Orange, possessed breath ‘more offensive than it is possible for those who have not been offended by it to imagine’.173

  Sometimes, but not always, the washing of other body parts followed. In 1750, John Wilkes observed that ‘the nobler parts are never in this island washed by women’, and John Hervey described a typical drawing-room gathering as ‘sweating and stinking in abundance as usual’.174 Caroline, however, bathed rather more frequently than her contemporaries. Her necessary woman, Susanna Ireland, would lug up ewers of hot water to fill her bath. The queen would remain dressed throughout in a yellow canvas shift.175

  Lord Chesterfield gave his son a piece of advice that reveals the general state of eighteenth-century fingernails: ‘you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people’s always are’.176 Caroline likewise liked her servants to be well-manicured, and Peter Wentworth grumbled that once ‘when I did not think she saw me, I was biting my nails. She called to me and said: “Oh fie! Mr Wentworth, you bite your nails very prettily.”’ He begged her pardon, and explained that he was trying to save the money the doctor demanded for cutting them.177

  Caroline maintained a show of polite friendliness while Henrietta stood by with the basin and towels, and made a point of calling her servant her ‘good Howard’.178 But the fact that Caroline’s hostility was concealed behind a veneer of charm made Henrietta’s life even more desolate. Caroline also used to call Henrietta ‘by way of banter, her sister Howard’. It might have sounded kind, but in reality it was ‘the strongest mark of aversion and contempt’.179

  The false friendship of the queen and the increasing coldness of the king must have made Henrietta’s burden far heavier than the actual basin she was supposed to hold. As John Hervey put it, her task was utterly thankless: ‘she was forced to live in the constant subjection of a wife with all the reproach of a mistress’.180 But she did so with wonderful grace. Alexander Pope wrote that Henrietta had ‘as much good nature’ as if she’d been ‘bred among lambs and turtle-doves, instead of princes and court-ladies’.181

  And Caroline had no qualms a
bout letting her real feelings flash through at any sign of insubordination. On one occasion (in Caroline’s words) Henrietta attempted to pick

  a quarrel with me about holding a basin of ceremony at my dressing, and to tell me, with her fierce little eyes and cheeks as red as your coat, that positively she would not do it; to which I made her no answer in anger, but calmly, as I would to a naughty child: ‘Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will; indeed you will.’182

  Exasperated by these ‘demeaning’ duties, the ‘most servile offices’ that Caroline could dream up, Henrietta took the trouble to consult precedent about the responsibilities of the Bedchamber Woman.183 She asked her friend Dr Arbuthnot to extract the exact job description from a retired predecessor who had served under Queen Anne. She hoped to find evidence that she need not hold the basin and thereby could avoid her daily ordeal.

  After Caroline had washed, Henrietta handed over the queen’s garments, one by one, to the more important Lady of the Bedchamber, who then gave them to the queen. Mary Cowper explained how the dance of dressing commenced: ‘the Duchess of St Albans put on the Princess’s shift, according to court rules’.184 Another ex-member of the bedchamber staff likewise recalled that ‘the Bedchamber Woman gave the fan to the Lady’, who then handed it to the queen.185 These nuances of role between the ‘Lady’ and the ‘Woman’ were considered to be of cut-throat importance.

  The shift that Caroline wore next to her skin was made of very fine Holland linen.186 Over it went a quilted white dimity petticoat, then a set of soft stays with silver hooks, and then a set of crimson whalebone hoops to support the skirt of her patterned silk dress. Caroline liked to wear the mantua, a coat-like dress worn over wide hoops, and bought no fewer than fourteen different models between 1730 and 1734.187 The queen’s clothes-shopping was prodigious: twenty fans a quarter; four silver girdles in a single month. Finally, the finishing touches were required: the Bedchamber Woman ‘pulled on the Queen’s gloves’ and ‘the page of the backstairs was called in to put on the Queen’s shoes’.188 She favoured slip-on mules rather than shoes, and her ‘walking slippers’ had red heels.189

  Next Caroline’s hairdresser, Mrs Purcell, would spread a short muslin cape over the queen’s shoulders to protect her dress while her hair was arranged into a high bun. Once a conical ‘powder mask’ had been placed over Caroline’s face, her tight curls were ‘clotted all over’ with white particles.190 Hairdressing was not terribly hygienic, and a Georgian lady could find her head being patted with ‘a paste of composition rare/ sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair’.191 Next one of Caroline’s ‘heads’ or ‘hoods’ of gauze or lace from France or Brussels would be settled over her hair; these were among the most expensive items in her wardrobe.192 During these closing stages of the toilette, George II would sometimes come in and criticise Henrietta’s work, snatching off the handkerchief from round Caroline’s shoulders and crying, ‘because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen’s!’193

  Finally, painting the face was a necessity for most courtiers, men as well as women. Rouged cheeks were daringly fashionable: as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it, ‘falsehood, like red on the face, should be used very seldom and very sparingly’.194 A cut and wet red ribbon sometimes did the trick. Caroline wore few cosmetics, although she did favour ‘patches’ (she purchased six ‘papers’ of patches in 1733, for example) to cover her smallpox scars.195

  Unfortunately for Henrietta, Dr Arbuthnot’s researches confirmed that the Bedchamber Woman certainly was required to hold the basin, and that it was indeed her duty to pour ‘the water out of the ewer upon the Queen’s hands’.196

  Once precedent had spoken in this dispute over etiquette, Caroline had no hesitation in reminding Henrietta that she was powerless. She first showed the velvet glove: ‘I told her I knew we should be good friends again.’ But then she gave a glimpse of the iron fist beneath, reminding Henrietta ‘that it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop through my fingers – thus –’197

  *

  The querulous queen, now nearly fifty, was not easy to dress elegantly, for her figure was decidedly overripe. Some people even called her the king’s ‘great fat-arsed wife’.198 Henrietta, at forty-five, had retained her charms rather more effectively. She dyed her hair blonde, and could still make Lord Peterborough, for one, tremble with lust: ‘When she comes in my way – the motion, the pain/The leapings, the achings, return all again.’199

  Despite her formidable powers of attraction, Henrietta was suffering from various health problems, including dreadful headaches and a hearing impairment. She had ‘a most intolerable pain in one side of her head’, while an operation upon her jaw caused ‘many weeks misery’.200

  In 1731, though, had come a great stroke of luck which enabled her to begin to consider a plan for escape. Even after separating from her husband, she’d remained close to his much more respectable brother, the Earl of Suffolk. The earl died on 22 June of that year. Having had no intention of letting his wastrel younger brother Charles inherit and squander his money, he left a considerable sum to his sister-in-law Henrietta instead.

  His death also meant that she became the Countess of Suffolk. At first Henrietta was rather embarrassed by all the bowing and scraping that she now received, and commanded her friend John Gay to stop calling her ‘Your Ladyship’ under threat of being sent supperless to bed.201 However, it was impossible that a peeress should remain in the menial position of Bedchamber Woman, and promotion for Henrietta was inevitable.

  It was also inevitable that Henrietta’s husband Charles would challenge his brother’s will. Disgusted by Charles’s nastiness, though, the old Earl of Suffolk had sewn up his estate so cleverly that Henrietta received her money intact. Indeed, Charles himself had only a couple of years more to live.

  Henrietta, now Lady Suffolk, bargained carefully for her new job in the royal household. People reported that she ‘was offered to be Lady of the Bedchamber, which she declined’.202 She held out for a more important post, Mistress of the Robes, and on 29 June 1731 she told John Gay that she had finally ‘kiss’d hands’ for her new place.203 Now her duties would be far lighter: in fact, her only task was ‘to give the Queen her jewels’. Her salary remained the same, because previously she’d received an extra hundred pounds a year on top of a Bedchamber Woman’s salary ‘for buying the Queen’s clothes’.204

  The lifting of the burden of constant service elated Henrietta. As she enthused to John Gay, her new situation promised ‘more happiness for the latter part of [her] life than [she’d] yet had a prospect of’. ‘My time is become very much my own,’ she wrote. And the money she had inherited would enable Henrietta to enjoy herself.

  She had ‘at this time a great deal of business’ upon her hands, not from her court job, but from a much more pleasurable project. She was supervising the building of a little house for herself by the Thames west of London, at Marble Hill.205 She’d purchased the site in 1724, and three years later she’d obtained and been greatly influenced by William Kent’s architectural book, The Designs of Inigo Jones. Nothing made her happier than inspecting the workmen’s progress upon her proposed Palladian villa. Peter Wentworth thought Henrietta’s good fortune had even ameliorated her deafness: ‘she’s so well pleased that she hears better already’.206

  So Henrietta now blossomed. The summer of 1734 saw her taking advantage of something that she’d never previously experienced: a holiday. She favoured the resort of Bath with her presence for six weeks. Because no one could remember Henrietta ever leaving the court before, it caused a sensation, and ‘occasion’d as much speculation in the family at Kensington as the removal of two or three minor Ministers would have done’.207

  But when she returned in October from her jaunt in the pump rooms and ballrooms of Bath, Henrietta found George II even less eager than before to share her company. Suspecting her of having consorted in Bath with his political enemies, he cut her dead in the drawing room.
And that ‘the King went no more in an evening to Lady Suffolk was whispered about the court by all that belonged to it’.208

  *

  To enter the royal household was difficult, but to leave it contrary to royal will was even harder. Henrietta had first sought to quit the court nearly ten years previously, but she’d been forbidden from doing so.

  Now, armed with what she thought was clear and incontrovertible evidence of the king’s disapproval, she sought a resignation interview with Caroline. She found herself in possession of ‘above an hour and a half alone’ with the queen in the bedchamber where so many of their previous showdowns had taken place.209

  The conversation was so painful and so important to Henrietta that after it was over she wrote it down. At first Caroline claimed that she hadn’t noticed Henrietta’s cold reception since her return from Bath: ‘You surprise me. What do you mean? I don’t believe ye King is angry … Child, you dream.’

  And she refused to listen to Henrietta’s complaints of court intrigue and the king’s coldness: ‘Come, my dear Lady Suffolk, you are very warm, but believe me I am your friend, your best friend. You don’t know a court. It’s not proper of me to say this, but indeed you don’t know a court.’ She told Henrietta not to mind court gossip, and reminded her how cold the world would seem outside the court bubble.

  But now Henrietta showed that she still had her integrity hidden away beneath her courtier’s shell, and she insisted that she wanted to leave. ‘Some people may shew me it was ye courtier and not me that was liked,’ she replied. ‘I can’t say that to keep such an acquaintance will be any argument for me to stay at court.’