Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  This explains why Caroline’s clothes accounts, which Henrietta had kept so carefully between 1730 and 1734, include payments for numerous whalebone hoops but only one set of stays, the waist-stiffening corset that would have been agonising to wear in the queen’s condition. Understandably, Caroline much preferred the soft stays usually confined to casual dress or to pregnancy.48

  Her condition came to a crisis in 1737 because a loop of her bowel had squeezed its way out through the hernia and become trapped there.49 This had caused a blockage in her digestive system. Caroline preferred silence to revealing such an immodest, embarrassing problem, and ‘kept this so great a secret that neither her children nor any of her servants who dress and put on her shift ever knew it’.50 During the ceremony of dressing, Caroline had long been careful to divert suspicion by standing for ‘some minutes in her shift talking to her ladies’.

  Once the secret was out, various of Caroline’s acts and words came to be seen in a new light. Sir Robert Walpole, for one, had some earlier suspicions confirmed. When Walpole’s wife had died, Caroline had questioned him closely about her declining health, and time and time again had ‘reverted to a rupture’. Walpole had rightly guessed that only a fellow sufferer could have taken such an interest in other people’s hernias.51

  ‘You lying fool,’ said Caroline to her husband when she discovered that he’d revealed her secret, but now she could not escape Dr Ranby’s examination. He insisted that she ‘put her hand where the pain was’ and, ‘following her with his hand, found it was a very large rupture’.52

  ‘There is no more time to be lost,’ he said. ‘Your Majesty has concealed it too long already.’53

  And indeed the risk to Caroline’s life had become much greater because the hernia was by now infected. It was whispered around the court that Caroline’s ‘rupture of the bowels’ might have ‘been easily reduced, if she had not delayed the disclosure of it till a mortification took place’.54

  ‘Will it ever be believed’, asked an exasperated Sir Robert Walpole, ‘that a life of this importance … should be lost, or run thus near, by concealing human infirmities?’55

  *

  Caroline was not in the right state of health or mind to battle boldly against her affliction. She was by now, in 1737, worn out by gout, the pressure of making constant public appearances as queen and nine pregnancies. People said that she had been ‘one of the most beautiful princesses of Europe’ but that she had now ‘grown too stout’.56

  She could no longer walk because of her gouty feet and was rolled regally ‘in and out of the Drawing Room every day’ in a decorative wheelchair. (It had been originally made for a masque at Kensington Palace, and Lady Deloraine had used it to appear in the character of a ‘Sea-Goddess’.57) Because she could no longer take her customary long walks, Caroline had grown so obese that she was afraid to turn herself in bed and had to be rolled over by a servant.58

  She’d given birth to seven surviving children, and no more were planned. Contraception by the use of an animal-gut prophylactic, tied on with a silk ribbon, was certainly possible by this period, and ‘Cundums’ were being sold in St James’s Park in 1708.59 (James Boswell described his first encounter ‘in armour’, with a seventeen-year-old prostitute in St James’s Park, as providing only a ‘dull satisfaction’.60) Instead of using contraception, though, George II simply abandoned Caroline in favour of other women.

  In John Hervey’s opinion, Caroline’s silence about her hernia was not just due to modesty. It was also a refusal to face the fact that her sexual powers were in decline. She was dismayed to find that she was losing her sexual sway over the king, because ‘power over him was the principal object of her pursuit’.61 In the past Caroline had tolerated Henrietta and his other mistresses – his ‘little corporeal excursions’ – because he had always eventually grown weary of them and had returned to his wife with relief.62

  For her part, Caroline had never been able to keep her hands off her husband and had ‘the most extravagant fondness for his person’. After Princess Louisa’s birth, she was far from considering herself freed from a distasteful task by no longer having to sleep with him. On the contrary, she deeply regretted her loss of pleasure.

  Hervey records Sir Robert Walpole’s very intimate conversations with Caroline, during which they freely discussed her fears about her declining sexual magnetism. Walpole advised her that ‘she must not expect after thirty years’ acquaintance, to have the same influence that she had formerly; that three-and-fifty and three-and-twenty could not more resemble one another in their effects than in their looks’. In fact, in his view, ‘she should no longer depend upon her person, but her head, for her influence’.63

  It sounds remarkable that John Hervey and Robert Walpole should describe and discuss the queen as a sexually voracious woman, but this was just before the important shift in the mid-eighteenth century, when attitudes towards female sexuality were transformed. Until this point, feminine desire was perceived as limitless, all-consuming and, in fact, downright dangerous to men. ‘Women are by far more lascivious and more amorous than men,’ it was confidently said, and indeed this was most worrying: ‘how can a man be fit to do his duty … after being exhausted in excess of conjugal embraces?’64

  The successive editions of the medical manual called The Ladies Physical Directory begin to reveal a change of attitude. First published in 1716, the text of the 1742 edition was amended to include a new paragraph in which it was now claimed that women were clearly ‘of a much colder temperature than men, and of course much less inclin’d to venery’. Nor were they ‘able to bear coition (to full satisfaction) half so often as men’.65 This is one example of a wider alteration in attitudes, described by the historian A. D. Hervey as ‘the waning of female lust’.66

  Caroline was a member of the last generation of women to live before a curtain was drawn down over the female libido. For the rest of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, females were considered incapable of wanting or enjoying sex. By 1850, a writer in the Westminster Review could claim that men’s ‘sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous’, while in women it is ‘dormant, if not non-existent, till excited’. He thought that women whose ‘position and education’ protected them from encountering any ‘exciting causes’ would therefore never become sexually aroused.

  ‘Happy for them that it is so!’ was his conclusion.67 Caroline would have found this as bizarre as it seems to twenty-first-century eyes.

  But this seemingly retrogressive step was actually the result of scientific progress. Pre-Enlightenment doctors thought that women were just weaker versions of men and that their sexual organs (inside their bodies) were simply another version of what men had on the outside. For conception to take place, then, the female orgasm was thought absolutely necessary, just as the male orgasm was (and is). Once people began to understand that the female orgasm was not essential for conception, female sexual satisfaction became much less of a priority. That’s why Victorian doctors doubted that females even experienced orgasms, whereas their predecessors had thought them a critical part of human reproduction.68

  The waning of her sexual potential made the 1730s seem like dangerous days of decline for Caroline.

  Yet the more the king neglected her, and the worse he treated her, the more respect and pity she earned from the people in general. Her heroism in bearing children and her toleration of the king’s latest new mistress – a Hanoverian named Amalie von Wallmoden – elevated her to an almost saintly position in the eyes of her subjects. George II’s image began to suffer as the ‘ordinary and the godly people took the turn of pitying the poor Queen, and railing at His Majesty for using so good a wife … so abominably ill’.69

  The king was left in no doubt about his growing unpopularity. One day, protesters climbed over the wall into Kensington Gardens to hand him a petition of complaint.70 Then a Thames waterman travelling past Hampton Court by boat yelled curses at the king ‘and all his Hanover dogs’ as he walke
d in the palace’s riverside garden. Meanwhile, Caroline bravely put it about that she cared nothing for her husband’s infidelity: she was ‘sorry for the scandal it gave others, but for herself she minded it no more than his going to the close stool’.71

  Even when George II was at home alone with her, Caroline had much to endure. He wanted chat, entertainment and unrelenting attention from his wife, ‘twenty hours in the twenty-four’. If Caroline failed to please in any way, his bad temper ‘used always to discharge its hottest fire, on some pretence or other, upon her’.

  John Hervey, always chivalrously attentive to Caroline’s feelings, recorded the increasingly miserable evenings which he had to spend with queen and king. He was forced to endure lengthy royal rants while Caroline tried to occupy herself with needlework. One night in 1735, Hervey and Caroline had to listen to George II’s ill-informed complaints upon a variety of barmy subjects: his objections to Bishop Hoadley, Caroline’s stupidity in spending her time and money on Merlin’s Cave at Richmond and her vacuity in visiting her friends, like ‘an old girl that loves to go abroad, no matter where’. Hervey observed that Caroline ‘coloured, and knotted a good deal faster during this speech than she did before, whilst the tears came into her eyes, but she said not one word’, and he tried to deflect the king’s attacks.

  The next day, he tenderly acknowledged Caroline’s proud refusal to admit to the absence of love and respect in her marriage. When she twitted him for pitying her, he pretended that he hadn’t seen the tears in her eyes. He made believe that he’d looked away because, if their eyes had met, they would have disgraced themselves by laughing.72

  So Caroline exchanged loving lies with John Hervey, the person in the world who at this point knew the most about her heart. They kept up a pretence that she’d choked down a giggle, not a sob.

  *

  When Caroline’s great and terrible suffering began, however, the crosspatch king began to reveal himself capable of quite unexpected depths of feeling.

  Despite his brutish reputation, George II had always found it easier to get on with women than with men. His passionate but short-lived rages alternated with equally strong sensations of empathy and compassion. His heartfelt condolences upon the death of her son brought the Countess of Hertford to tears, as he showed so much distress on his face and in the sorrowful ‘tone of his voice’.73

  This ‘high degree of sensibility’, which the king usually tried to keep hidden from view, would have seemed simply ‘incredible’ to those who hadn’t witnessed it themselves.74 It was quite characteristic that the king punched one of the doctors who’d dared to suggest that Caroline’s illness was terminal. But his courtiers found the king’s anger completely understandable, and attributable to ‘the violent concern he had for her, and his disorder for want of sleep … having sat up with her three nights running’.75

  George II’s initial wooing of Caroline had been shrouded in romance and mystery. He’d made a midnight journey in disguise to Celle in Germany in order to spy upon the beautiful blonde princess as she passed through the town on a journey of her own.76 Having set eyes upon Caroline, he was overwhelmed with ‘desire’ and found himself ‘most eager to marry her without delay’.77 Caroline was ‘surprised and agitated’ when she received the envoy bearing his marriage offer on 22 June 1705.78 But she soon composed herself to accept.

  The whole affair – ‘which hath hitherto been conceal’d with so much care’ – was finally made public, and their betrothal was widely celebrated.79 Caroline’s lover wrote to her with passion: ‘I desire nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess’s feet and promise her eternal devotion; you alone, Madam, can make me happy.’80

  And in some sense this was still true, over thirty years later. For, despite his infidelities, his sulks and his casual cruelties, this king still loved his queen.

  Indeed, when he suffered a near-drowning during a rough return from the continent in early 1737, George II’s thoughts turned immediately to Caroline. He wrote a letter showering her with ‘the warmest phrases that youthful poets could use in elegies to their mistresses’. Back on dry land after an unsettling few days, he felt never ‘more desirous than at that moment of opening his heart to her, because it had never felt warmer towards her’.

  Despite his many faults, George II could write a good love letter. In competition for a woman like Caroline, who could be won with words, a literary gentleman would rather have had ‘any man in the world for a rival than the King … in the gift of writing love-letters [no] man ever surpassed him’.

  Caroline was so proud of the letter written after the stormy voyage that she showed it to John Hervey and Sir Robert Walpole, with the warning: ‘do not think because I show you this that I am an old fool and vain of my person and charms’. But Hervey was not deceived and saw that really she was delighted by her husband’s continued ‘passion and tenderness’.

  Now it was the writer of love letters, ‘the easiest, the most natural, the warmest’ of men, who fell in love with his wife once again as she lay sick.81 From the first moment of her illness, he devoted himself to Caroline’s care with surprising constancy.

  *

  When Caroline’s illness was at last successfully diagnosed in November 1737, her doctors made a terrible mistake.

  A ‘mortified’, or decayed, part of her bowel was now poking out through the wall of her stomach. The Royal Society had recently approved the surgeon Mr Stuart’s book entitled New Discoveries and Improvements in the most considerable Branches of Anatomy and Surgery, which included ‘ruptures of all kinds cured without cutting’.82 The doctors should really have pushed the bowel back inside and sewn up the hole.

  Instead, they cut it off.

  Her late father-in-law had been accustomed to call Caroline ‘cette diablesse la Princesse [that devil-woman the Princess]’, a description which hints at the steely soul hidden inside her plump exterior.83 And Caroline’s tenacity, resignation and resolution during the terrible days that followed were spectacular.

  She now underwent almost daily surgery in her bed-chamber, under the knife of Dr John Ranby and his assistant, without the benefit of opium. The energetic Dr Ranby sometimes had to change his cap and waistcoat halfway through an operation because he’d soaked them in sweat.84 Peter Wentworth reported that Caroline bravely cracked jokes before he began work each day. ‘Before you begin let me have a full view of your comical face,’ she would say to Dr Ranby, and, while his blade went in, she’d ask: ‘what wou’d you give now that you was cutting your wife’?85

  Dr Ranby, the son of an inn-keeper, had been a member of the Royal Society since 1724. As a surgeon, he was lower in status than a general physician, but he had perhaps more practical skills. Surgeons trained on the job for seven years, rather than attending university and winning a degree as did the socially superior branch of the medical profession. They were supposed to restrict themselves to ‘internal’ medicine only, but had branched out into treating sexually transmitted diseases as well. Their activities were closely linked to those of the barber, and were regulated by the Company of Barber-Surgeons. Surgeons usually plied their trade in shops and backrooms, working as quickly as they could on patients lashed down and often anaesthetised only with alcohol.

  Physicians, on the other hand, jealously guarded their right to make expensive house visits. Poorer people had to make do instead with the advice of the apothecary in his shop full of herbal cures and the traditional symbolic stuffed alligator.

  Caroline teased Dr Ranby about his wife, ‘cross old’ Jane, because in November 1737 he was seeking from her not only ‘a separation, but a divorce’.86 Ranby’s only son was illegitimate, but his irregular personal life had proved no obstacle to his becoming sergeant-surgeon to the royal family.

  Despite an aggressive and abrasive manner, Dr Ranby enjoyed considerable professional status. He’d published accounts of the medical oddities he had seen during post-mortems, such as a bladder containing sixty stones, a boy with an ou
tsize spleen weighing two pounds, and a man whose swollen testicle contained four ounces of water.87 Tradition has it that Dr Ranby was the inspiration for the uppity surgeon in Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, a character who ‘was a little of a coxcomb’ but ‘nevertheless very much of a surgeon’.88

  For his operation upon Caroline, Ranby had requested the aid of a comrade. Wise old Dr Bussier, formerly George I’s doctor and now ‘near the age of ninety’, stood near to Dr Ranby to direct him in ‘how to proceed in cutting Her Majesty’. Unfortunately this Dr Bussier ‘happened by the candle in his hand to set fire to his wig, at which the Queen bid Ranby stop awhile for he must let her laugh’. The three of them proceeded with the bleak, black humour of medical students.

  The incision into the infected area of Caroline’s stomach had dramatic results. Given an outlet at last, the wound ‘cast forth so great a quantity of corruption’ that it created a horrific stench throughout the room. The doctors still did not quite understand what was going on: they thought that Caroline’s stomach contained an abscess that would grow unless removed.89

  So they cut away at Caroline’s bowel. If the intestine had been pushed back inside and the rupture sealed up, all may have been well. Cutting the bowel, though, destroyed Caroline’s digestive system, and with it all hope of her recovery.

  Even at the time her treatment was recognised to have been flawed. She’d been attended, people said, by ‘a throng of the killing profession trying their utmost skill to prolong her life in adding more torment to it’.90 She would not be the first, nor the last, person in eighteenth-century London to have ‘died of the doctor’.91

  The doctors had an arsenal of mass-produced medicines from which to choose to ease Caroline’s pain, including Dr Ward’s Pills, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Cordial and Daffy’s Elixir and its many rivals (‘Mrs Daffy is pleased to call my Elixir spurious, and insinuates as if it were hazardous to the lives of men’92). Caroline was also offered snakeroot and brandy, usquebaugh (Irish whiskey) and mint water. Of all these, mint water was the only sensible treatment for a digestive complaint, and it is still administered in cases of colic today.