Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  But Caroline could not keep these palliatives down long enough for them to take effect, and suffered on stoically without them. In the middle of his undoubted concern for his wife, George II could still be brusque with her, asking why she bothered to eat the food that she vomited up again and irrelevantly demanding that ‘his last new ruffles’ be ‘sewed upon the shirt he was to put on that day at his public dressing’.93 Even in this great crisis, George II remained something of his pettifogging self.

  *

  During her illness, Caroline’s world shrank. It now consisted of only her bed-chamber overlooking the courtyard in St James’s Palace and her sumptuous bed, with its fifty separate textile components, including no fewer than five mattresses.

  This little world was nevertheless still accessible to a surprising number of people. For a start, her family rallied round:

  Princess Caroline went to bed at night in her own apartment; the Princess Emily sat up in the Queen’s bed-chamber; Lord Hervey lay on a couch in the next room, and the King had his own bedding brought and laid upon the floor in the little room behind the Queen’s dressing room.94

  John Hervey also records the many and various people present and the jobs performed in the queen’s private apartment during normal times. John Teed, her chocolate-maker, milled the ingredients for her morning drink.95 Mrs Purcell, her hairdresser and laundress (‘a forward, pert, silly woman’), brought it to her. The French Lady Charlotte Roussie and the German Mrs Schütz, Caroline’s attendants, were accustomed ‘like angry monkeys’ to chatter, ‘none guessing what’s the language or the matter’. As she was dressed at noon each day by her Women of the Bed-chamber, Caroline’s chaplains prayed in the next room. At night, after she had finished playing cards, the page of the back-stairs named Shaw snuffed out the candles, and a servant called La Behn read aloud to the queen until she fell asleep.96

  After Caroline fell ill, members of Prince Frederick’s household repeatedly tried to inveigle their way into St James’s. Some of them almost managed to breach her bed-chamber itself, so eager were they to bring back accurate news to their master. As tension mounted, special orders were given to exclude as many people outside the immediate family as possible. Caroline constantly called her children in to give them last words of love and advice. To the Princess Louisa, for example, she said (with strange prescience): ‘Louisa, remember I die by being giddy, and obstinate in having kept my disorder a secret!’ Louisa would die of a rupture very similar to her mother’s, similarly concealed.97

  George II answered Prince Frederick’s frequent messages of concern and requests to visit with more angry denials: ‘No, no! He shall not come and act any of his silly plays here, false, lying, cowardly, nauseous puppy.’ According to Frederick’s arch-enemy, John Hervey, Caroline gladly faced death without forgiving her son. ‘At least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed,’ he reported her to have said, ‘I shall never see that monster again.’98

  But hints given by other, less hostile, witnesses suggest that Caroline secretly longed to be reconciled with her son and that he was often on her mind. Lord Egmont heard tell that ‘she forgave him everything he had done against her, but could not see him while he continued his favour to the King’s enemies’. Egmont’s diary for the period of Caroline’s illness also contains a milder version of George II’s response to Frederick’s request to visit: ‘The King said he took it kindly, and went to acquaint the Queen with it, leaving her to do in it as she pleased: but Her Majesty declined it, saying I forgive him with all my heart the injuries he has done me.’99

  Egmont also reported that Caroline had made a poignant plea to her husband: ‘though she did not see the Prince, we hear she desired His Majesty not to forget he was her son’.100

  So the quarrel looked set to continue into the grave, with regret on both sides. Caroline ruefully warned her sixteen-year-old second son, William Augustus, to be ‘always dutiful to his father, & never to listen to anyone, who might be wicked enough to insinuate to him, that they cou’d have separate interests’.

  There was more satisfaction to be found in being a good son, Caroline said, ‘than in the possession of all the empires of the world’.101

  *

  After the operation to remove the mortified part of the queen’s intestine, the court’s spirits lifted a little. Every hope was pinned to her successfully ‘passing’ something through her digestive system, as this would demonstrate that her bowels were still in working order. Enemas were used to help the process and, encouragingly, ‘came away with some excrement’.102

  ‘I am in great hopes,’ wrote Peter Wentworth, ‘for God be praised the Queen [is] in good spirits.’103

  For days Caroline lingered on with her bowels half in and half out, until, on Thursday 17 November, the news turned decidedly bad. Now her stomach practically exploded: ‘the Queen’s vomitings returned with as much violence as ever, and in the afternoon one of the guts burst in such a manner that all her excrement came out of the wound in her belly’. The ‘running at the wound was in such immense quantities that it went all through the quilts of the bed and flowed all over the floor’.104 Despite the news blackout, Alexander Pope somehow found out about these latest events:

  Here lies wrapt up in forty thousand towels

  The only proof that Caroline had bowels.105

  Two days later, on Saturday 19 November, the end seemed near when ‘more than a chamber pot full of corruption came out of the wound’, although Caroline also managed to sleep and to eat some chicken.106

  At 10 o’clock that night things were looking decidedly bleak: John Hervey’s mother Lady Bristol told her husband that ‘the Queen’s vomiting is returned, which has been ceased for three days … I am afraid to say what I think; I am going back to my post’.107

  Throughout her ordeal, Caroline remained stronger than those around her. ‘She had not the least fears of the pains she endured,’ it was said, nor was she frightened ‘of the last closing scene’. Her only concern was ‘for the King’s affliction’, which was ‘certainly as sincere and intense, as ever human nature sustain’d’.108

  In one of Caroline’s last lucid conversations with her husband, she returned to him a ring he had once given her, saying that she owed everything to him. She begged him to marry again after her death, but ‘wiping his eyes, and sobbing between every word’, he stammered out his response to her suggestion: ‘Non – j’aurai – des – maîtresses [No … I will have … mistresses]’.109 He might take lovers, he said, but he would never take a second queen.

  Then he kissed her face and her hands a hundred times.

  The end came on Sunday 20 November at 11 o’clock, when Caroline asked for one of the Bed-chamber Women to take away the candle that stood by her bed. Her husband asked her if the light was hurting her eyes. ‘No Sir,’ she said, ‘I wou’d spare you the affliction of seeing me die.’110 Caroline lay quietly in the dark for a quarter of an hour, before asking her daughter Amelia to kneel by her bed and read a prayer. Before Amelia had finished, Caroline whispered, ‘I am going,’ and covered her mouth with her hand.

  It was her last gesture. As she died, ‘the King’s hand was in hers’.111

  *

  ‘Like an earthquake’, Caroline’s death was a ‘shock to the nation’.112 Her last moments were talked about, written about, debated and endlessly reinterpreted. It was said that she ‘died very heroically’, yet at the same time with ‘all the resignation imaginable’.113 Her chaplain, Dr Alured Clarke, founder of hospitals, sought and found evidence of her Christian belief when he wrote at length about the prayer she’d said ‘of her own composing’, which ‘demonstrated the vigour of a great and good mind’.114 On the other hand, the old Duchess of Marlborough, with her customary plain speaking, said that Dr Clarke had written a ‘nauseous panegyric’ aimed at earning its author ‘the first bishoprick that falls’.115

  Others preferred to believe that, like a true queen of the Enlightenment, Caroline had
refused the sacrament on her deathbed and that the Archbishop of Canterbury had covered up for her, discreetly fudging the matter by telling those who asked that she ‘was in a heavenly disposition’ rather than directly answering the question of whether she had taken it or not.116

  Some people thought, rather unsympathetically, that ‘the Queen’s death was wholly owing to her own fault’, and John Ranby (with a justifiable concern for his reputation) was heard to declare that if he’d been told about the rupture ‘two days sooner, she should have been walking about the next day’.117 Still others found consolation for their own lowly status by reflecting on the fact that even the ‘glaring mask of Royalty’ hid only ‘flesh, however dignified or distinguished’.118

  But the last word may go to Dr Clarke, who here sums up the views of many:

  it was truly said of her, that the same softness of behaviour and command of herself, that appeared in the drawing room, went along with her into her private apartments, gladdened everybody that was about her person … did not fail her even in the hour of death itself.119

  Orthodox believer or religious radical, everyone found something to emulate in this horrible but admirable death.

  *

  Now Caroline’s corpse was treated with the greatest respect and embalmed ‘in the manner of the Egyptians, at the expense of between 5 and £600’. ‘Her whole family’ of children and servants attended it, just ‘as if she was alive’.120

  The queen’s Ladies of the Bed-chamber, Lord Chamberlain and Master of the Horse watched over her body by day, while two Maids of Honour, two Bedchamber Women and an equerry kept guard at night.121 Peter Wentworth reported that the servants were on vigil from noon till nine, with a break of three hours for dinner; ‘this to be continued till she’s bury’d’.122

  The obese Queen Caroline, sketched on her deathbed by one of her ladies. Alexander Pope wrote of this picture: ‘ALAS! what room for Flattery, or for Pride!/She’s dead! – but thus she looked the hour she dy’d’

  At Caroline’s funeral there were twelve Yeomen of the Guard to carry her coffin to Westminster Abbey.123 It was preceded by her crown, carried by her chamberlain on a black velvet cushion, and followed by a procession of her ladies in black crape.124 Because Prince Frederick was still in disgrace, Princess Amelia was chief mourner, and it was ‘never heard that children grieve[d] more for a mother’ than she and her sisters did.125

  For many weeks, George II was unable to speak of his wife without weeping, and ‘look’d as if he had lost his crown’.126 Sir Robert Walpole found the king ‘with a flood of tears gushing from his royal eyes’. With agonised sobs, he reminisced how his wife’s sweetness had softened even ‘his own harshness and resentment’.127 His daughters ordered the queens to be taken out of the pack of cards for the king’s evening game because the sight of them ‘put him into so great a disorder’.128 One sad day he borrowed a portrait of Caroline from a courtier in order to meditate with it for two hours in his bed-chamber. At the end of this time, he had to some extent come to terms with his loss. ‘Take this picture away,’ he said. ‘I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.’129

  Given that his mistress Henrietta had, for so many years, been almost literally in the position of buckling Caroline’s shoes, it is clear where the king’s true passion lay.

  And on into the new year of 1738, the bereaved king remained troubled by disturbing dreams. According to court gossip, he made a midnight journey to Westminster Abbey and visited Caroline’s vault, ordering her coffin to be broken open so that he could see her embalmed body by candlelight. He needed to reassure himself that she really was dead after seeing a vision of her walking abroad once more.130

  *

  Others were equally hard hit. It was said that John Hervey was strangely tranquil, ‘as calm as ever … but afflicted to the greatest degree’. He looked upon Caroline’s death ‘as the greatest misfortune that could befall him’. In fact, ‘the loss of so much of the pleasure of his life’ made ‘the rest not worth thinking of’.131

  When his icy calm broke down, it did so dramatically. At one court party Hervey found that even the queen’s death could not curb the high spirits of the Maids of Honour. Totally unlike his usual urbane self, he simply swore at them in the foulest language.132

  John Hervey had written, with all the sincerity of which he was capable, that Caroline was the only person who could control or steer him:

  My gracious Queen, who, angry, spares

  And, whilst she chides my faults, my folly bears

  Whose goodness ev’ry day and hour I prove

  And look upon, like heav’n with fear and love.133

  He and she had been linked by a strange friendship that vaulted the chasms between them: a gap in age, between royalty and commoner, between German and English, between male and female. Never again would he hear his crony exclaiming her characteristic ‘Oh, dummer Teuffel! [Oh, dull devil!]’ about a tiresome courtier, hear her contagious laugh or see her dancing, dangerously, in her slip-on mules.134

  John Hervey was one of the few people who understood just how much the constant compliments and complaints of court life bored and blunted Caroline. He railed against the stereotypical courtier or ‘court-brute’ who failed to understand that one ‘should never lead a Queen but by the hand’.

  Both of them were interminably tired by a life that underused their considerable minds, and Hervey thought that there was little more to keep him in the trivial, repetitive role of Vice-Chamberlain, ‘fit for nothing but to carry candles and set chairs all my life’.135 His relationship with Caroline was in many ways the most significant of all his days, because for once he’d had no hand in ending it.

  Now he wrote, tenderly, of his lost friend: ‘sure in sleep no dullness you need fear’.136

  And while he had been devoting his time to keeping Caroline amused, John Hervey had let the other great love of his life slip away. On 15 March 1736, Stephen Fox had made a sudden and startling marriage, to the heiress Elizabeth Strangways Horner. ‘The Town’, it was reported at the time, ‘is at present very much entertain’d with little Ste: Fox’s wedding, who on Monday night last ran away with the great fortune Miss Horner, who is but just thirteen years old & very low and childish of her age.’137 If John Hervey had been expecting his lover to make a marriage of convenience, for form and money’s sake, he was disappointed, for Ste seemed distressingly affectionate towards his child bride.

  Having lost his wife, his queen and the man he loved best, John Hervey was now left alone.

  *

  Peter Wentworth was similarly stricken by Caroline’s death. ‘I am obliged to tell you’, he wrote to his brother, ‘that the best of Queens died Sunday night between ten and 11.’138

  Caroline had loved to embarrass the bemused and blushing Wentworth with her affection. Her characteristic tease had been to call him ‘une tres bon enfant’ and to josh him with a mixture of mockery and kindness: ‘we are speaking of you; you know I love you, and you shall know I love, I do really love you!’ Wentworth was always left speechless by her adoration, being able only to make ‘low bows’, as he ‘had not the impromptu wit nor assurance to make any other answer’.139

  Wentworth’s shell of shyness had been shattered by Caroline alone: ‘I swear by all the Gods, if it had not been for the Queen’s extreme goodness to me, my heart had been broak,’ he had said.140

  Unfortunately, the cure for a broken heart would now seem to Wentworth only to lie at the bottom of a ‘bumper of Burgundy’.141 He even attached little importance to his humorous, lively, merry letters. ‘What I writ’, he stated, ‘goes for the writing of a drunk fellow, & as such ought not to be valued.’142

  ‘A drunk fellow’ who was ‘not to be valued’ was exactly how he saw himself.

  *

  George II had promised his wife that he would look after her servants, and he kept his word. Like the others, Peter Wentworth found that his place and salary were assured, for he was to be kept on
‘to do duty about the Princesses’.143 Lady Bristol described how the king broke the news about their futures to the servants: ‘I think in all my life I never saw anything in a tragedy ever come up to it; his tears flowed so fast he could not utter a word, nor was there a dry eye in the room … my spirits have been more than ordinary sunk ever since.’144 Mrs Purcell, the late queen’s dresser, agreed that they had ‘lost the best queen, friend & mistress, that ever servants had: yet still all my faculties seem benumb’d as if seized with a palsy … what one suffers with La Coeur Serré [a heavy heart]’.145

  Caroline’s loss was deeply felt outside the household, too, with naughty posters again appearing round town:

  Oh death, where is thy sting?

  To take the Queen, and leave the King?146

  London became ‘the most dismal of places’, for all plays and operas were forbidden for three months after Caroline’s death.147 George II grimly pressed on with his job and managed to host a drawing-room party in January 1738. But he appeared in public for a mere two minutes, with ‘grief still fixed on his face’.148

  The Opposition claimed that the court’s mourning was over the top and injurious to trade. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ingeniously argued the other side of the case: as people were forbidden from wearing foreign silk for the duration, a great boost would be given ‘to the woollen manufacture, the staple commodity of these kingdoms’.149