Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  On his return to St James’s Palace, the king had Amalie’s portrait hung up at the foot of his bed. The compliment demonstrated ‘the violence of his love’, people thought, but they also murmured that he really might have constrained himself out of consideration for his wife and daughters.16

  His daily habits changed. Previously he’d spent each morning until eleven with Caroline. But now he abandoned his wife in order to write instead ‘for two or three hours to Madame Wallmoden, who never failed sending and receiving a letter every post’. Understandably, this was the period during which Caroline began to fall prey to doubt and depression.

  By May 1736, George II was determined to return to Hanover, in order to keep a promise he’d made to Amalie to be back for her birthday on the 29th of that month.17 When he arrived, he was presented with a newborn baby: Johann Ludwig von Wallmoden. He would never openly acknowledge this child as his son, but he was widely assumed to be the father. Certainly Amalie told George II that this was the case, and his ‘silly vanity’ in his senile virility cemented her position even further.18

  Once again the king dallied overlong in Hanover that summer, reliving the gratifications of having a young wife and family. Back in London yet another satirical poster mysteriously appeared on the gate of St James’s Palace:

  Lost or strayed out of this house, a man who has left a wife and six children on the parish; whoever will give any tidings of him to the churchwardens of St James’s Parish, so as he may be got again, shall receive four shillings and sixpence reward.

  N.B. This reward will not be increased, nobody judging him to deserve a Crown.19

  When the king finally arrived back home early in 1737, it was actually to spend his last few months, and to become reconciled, with Caroline. Yet he planned to invite Amalie to come to Britain as well so that he need not be parted from either his wife or his mistress.

  *

  Perhaps surprisingly, Caroline had agreed to this proposal. Having endured the ménage à trois with Henrietta for so many years, she’d accepted Sir Robert Walpole’s advice that she should once again be tolerant. ‘If you can but once get this favourite to St James’s,’ he argued, ‘she will in three months be everything Lady Suffolk was, but deaf.’ Walpole faced Caroline with an unenviable choice: ‘whether you will fear her at a distance or despise her near’.20

  So, when George II proved to be incapable of dragging himself away from Hanover in time to return to London for his birthday in 1736, Caroline had begged her husband to bring Amalie back with him too.21 She was stoutly welcoming in attitude, and promised to ‘get Lady Suffolk’s lodgings ready immediately’. She even planned to put her own books into storage so that Amalie could have more space.

  In addition to the support of Sir Robert Walpole, then, Amalie von Wallmoden also had the (reluctant) blessing of the queen.

  But Caroline did not really want Amalie in the palace, and everyone knew it. The Ladies of the Bedchamber were overheard ‘saying they hoped never to see this saucy whore brought under Her Majesty’s nose’, and in private Caroline ‘dreaded’ Amalie’s arrival. She now regretted having driven away Henrietta, who had been ‘powerless, and so little formidable’.22

  Amalie, in fact, failed to appear in England during Caroline’s lifetime, rightly fearing that she would be far from universally welcome. Wilder London gossip claimed that the king could not afford the £50,000 she’d demanded as a fee for coming (as she was German, everyone assumed that she must be greedy).23 And then, of course, Caroline had fallen ill, and her husband’s love for her had been reignited, burning stronger than ever. When he was left bereft by Caroline’s death, it was with some hope of cheering him up that Sir Robert Walpole finally sent for the abandoned Amalie the following year.

  In June 1738, Amalie and a few attendants crossed the Channel and arrived in London. She lived at first in ‘a mighty mean dirty lodging in St James’s Street’, but this was only while the official mistress’s lodgings were being prepared for her at St James’s.24 Again anonymous and critical verses appeared on the palace gates:

  Here lives a man of fifty-four

  Whose royal father’s will he tore

  And thrust his children out of door

  Then killed his wife and took a whore.25

  George II with his late-life mistress, Amalie. Caroline’s portrait looks down with resignation from the wall behind them

  Amalie was soon allocated lodgings at both St James’s and Kensington Palaces, and none other than Molly Hervey was asked to recommend English servants to pad out her entourage.26 The housekeeper at Kensington, Mrs Jane Keen, was still in harness but by now made immobile by gout. She prepared for Amalie the spacious but damp apartment formerly occupied by Henrietta. Amalie did at least insist upon having it smartened up with expensive wallpaper.27

  Since the queen’s death, Kensington Palace had no longer been bustling with busy courtiers, and people wondered why Amalie was placed in Henrietta’s ‘unwholesome apartment’ when other, drier, nicer ones were available. She herself was philosophical on the subject: there may well have been better apartments, she said, ‘mais pas pour moi’.28 It was another example of George II’s extreme devotion to precedent and routine, and also an indication of Amalie’s calm, soothing character. Wisely, she never wearied the king with ‘solicitations either for herself, her relations, her creatures or dependents’.29 She was biddable, not formidable.

  Now Amalie began to appear in the palace drawing room of an evening, ‘like one that has been used to the courts of Princes’.30 The warmth of her reception caused a stir, and it was considered ‘quite new; for, though all kings have had mistresses, they were attended at their own lodgings, and not in so public a manner’.31 And, in 1740, all the other potential mistresses received a sad setback when Amalie, newly divorced by her German husband, was naturalised as a British citizen and given the title of Countess of Yarmouth. (There was once an embarrassing incident at a dinner when a gentleman unfamiliar with the court proposed a toast to the ‘Count of Yarmouth’, failing to realise that he didn’t exist.32)

  Despite her strong position, though, Amalie suffered from various disadvantages. She was Hanoverian, a nationality less than popular with the British. Her English was poor; at thirty-six she had lost her youth; and she was pretty much friendless at court. Germans in general, and Amalie in particular, were thought to be poor lovers, the most ‘inert bedfellows in the world’.33 She never made jokes, and never burst into ‘immoderate fits of mirth’ at anybody else’s.34

  Even her writing was monotonously neat and sloped like a schoolgirl’s, her prose heavy as German dumplings.35

  ‘Inoffensive, and attentive only to pleasing’ was Horace Walpole’s conclusion on Amalie von Wallmoden: not the perfect qualities to engage for long the attention of the man who had loved the feisty Caroline.36

  *

  So much for Amalie von Wallmoden. She was a sound candidate for the job of chief mistress, but she faced a formidable adversary: the solidly British Mary Howard, dowager Countess of Deloraine. Mary Deloraine had the advantages of being pretty, English and completely unscrupulous.

  Born in Hampshire to a naval family, Mary made her court debut in about 1723 as yet another of the Maids of Honour appointed to attend Caroline as Princess of Wales. Three years later she resigned from her post upon her marriage to Henry Scott, first Earl of Deloraine. They’d met through work, as Henry was a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to George Augustus, then Prince of Wales. Henry Scott and Prince George Augustus were hand in glove. Together they trawled London incognito on nights out: once they visited Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield, dined at the Red Lion Tavern and came home at 4 o’clock the next morning.37 Henry also held a post in the army, and after his marriage took Mary to live in his house in Leicester Fields.

  On Christmas Day 1730, he was climbing into his coach when he was suddenly ‘taken with a fit of an apoplexy’ and died.38 Although he’d been twenty-seven years older than her, Mary took her husband
’s death very badly and mourned him deeply. But she also rather liked the idea of herself as a tragic, widowed countess.

  She’d had two daughters with Henry, and now she miscarried a third child, a boy, who’d been conceived before his death. After all the upset, she made something of a recovery and returned to royal service. In 1733, she, Henrietta Howard and Queen Caroline all went out together on a shopping expedition, with the aim of seeing ‘several fine curiosities in china’ lately arrived from India.39

  Mary’s new job at court was as governess to the youngest princesses, Mary and Louisa. At first she struggled severely with her responsibilities. She was still seen to be ‘often in tears for the loss of her Lord, which sometimes leaves marks of grief in her eyes’.40 This spoof advice to a governess sums up her rather giddy and emotional approach to her duties: ‘make the Misses read French and English novels, and French romances … to soften their nature, and make them tender-hearted’.41

  But Mary would now prove herself to be an idealistic if slightly unstable romantic, falling in love easily, dusting herself down and beginning again after each failure. She appeared to advantage as a ‘Sea-Goddess’ in a court masque, and despite her grief she quickly acquired a new suitor. Court etiquette decreed that she should have vacated her post again on her second marriage, to William Wyndham, in April 1734 (the year that Henrietta left court). When he first proposed, the town talk had it that

  Lady Deloraine had asked the Queen’s leave to marry Mr Wyndham, and that the Queen told her she had no objection to her marrying, though she had an insurmountable one to any married woman being Governess to her daughters. Upon which my Lady has prudently resolved to keep her own employment, and give Mr Wyndham no new one.42

  ‘I am sorry for her,’ wrote one court insider, ‘for I believe she has a mind to it, and it would certainly be a great advantage to her.’43 It was another romance made on the job, for Mr Wyndham was a tutor to Prince William Augustus. Mary Deloraine remained for some time ‘undetermined which is best, a husband, or a court employment’.44

  Somehow Mary eventually talked Caroline round into allowing her to continue as governess, even as a married woman. So she and Mr Wyndham wed, and the king and queen did ‘the new married couple the honour to sup with them, at their apartment in St James’s House’.45

  But she continued to be unlucky. It may be remembered that her miscarriage of Mr Wyndham’s child interrupted preparations for Prince William Augustus’s birthday ball for children in 1735. Her labour had lasted four dreadful days, during which the drums and music for the changing of the guard at St James’s Palace were cancelled to avoid disturbing her.46

  ‘Poor dear thing … so beautiful a creature,’ Mary said, telling everybody who’d listen all about her stillborn baby, until theatrical ‘tears stopped her voice’.47

  Although Mary was now Mrs Wyndham, everyone continued to call her Lady Deloraine from her first and grander marriage. She can be seen hard at work once again, accompanying her royal charges to a private theatrical performance in William Hogarth’s painting A Performance of ‘The Indian Emperor, or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards’. Instead of enjoying the show, she is busily castigating one of the children. She looks a little harassed, though cruelly and elegantly corseted into slenderness.

  While people were slightly equivocal about Amalie von Wallmoden’s appearance, Mary Deloraine was decidedly pretty, and pretty in the English fashion. One foreigner visiting London decided that if he were ever to hang himself for love, ‘it should be for an English woman’. ‘They have the finest hair in the world,’ he judged, ‘and are only obliged to pure Nature for the beauty of their complexions. It is a pleasure to see them blush.’48 Mary retained into her thirties the wonderful ‘bloom’ of a fifteen-year-old, and even the pernickety John Hervey found her face extraordinarily charming. The only feature he could find to criticise ‘was something remarkably awkward about her arms which were long and bony, with a pair of ugly white hands at the end of them’.49

  Good skin, awkward posture: Mary Deloraine was the archetypal English rose.

  *

  But Mary Deloraine had two important disadvantages. The first was her tendency to be as tipsy as she was pretty: she was addicted to alcohol. The king complained that she ‘stank of Spanish wine’, and Horace Walpole said she had ‘most of the vices of her own sex, and the additional one of ours, drinking’.50

  Secondly, as their former governess, she was heartily disliked by George II’s daughters the princesses, and they would do all they could to damage her chances. In fact, her long and tangled relationship with the royal family meant that the courtiers treated her with familiarity but also a touch of contempt. Far from being a favourite at court, as Henrietta had been, she was considered ‘very dangerous … a weak head, a pretty face, a lying tongue, and a false heart’.51

  During her years at court, Mary had developed an unenviable reputation for silliness and arrogance: people said that she ‘really works miracles in idiocy’.52 While she may have been rather shallow and self-absorbed, though, she also had the serious misfortune to make an enemy of John Hervey, and much of the vitriol that corroded her reputation dripped from his malevolent but influential pen. In 1731, he wrote ironically to Ste Fox that

  your beauty, friend and passion, Lady Deloraine, came to me the other day, and complained that she was not in fashion this year, and asked me if I could conceive the reason of it. She said everybody seemed to neglect and avoid her. I told her I thought it was easy to be accounted for; that envy kept the women at a distance, and despair the men; to which she only answered, ‘Pshaw’, turned to the glass, reflected on her conduct, and believed me.53

  In his letters he often called Mary Deloraine by her court nickname of ‘La Mouche’, ‘La Moscula’ or ‘The Fly’, and revelled in her misfortunes.54

  *

  ‘The Fly’ tried to buy the popularity that seemed always just beyond her grasp with extravagant parties. Many were happy to take advantage, including the 120 ‘Ladies and Gentleman’ who came to a very elegant breakfast that she hosted in hired rooms for Princess Mary’s birthday in 1739.55

  And even her enemies were forced to admire Mary’s unwavering and indomitable spirit and ambition. It was said that she would stop at nothing in order to get what she wanted, and she had already seen off a number of other potential royal mistresses.

  In 1731, John Hervey reported his disappointment that nice Northumbrian Lady Tankerville was leaving court; he liked her better than ‘all those fine ladies put together’. Straightforward Camilla Bennett, Countess of Tankerville, was a butcher’s daughter from Tyneside; her husband was in Prince Frederick’s household. For a few months she was another, earlier and particularly good-natured rival of Mary Deloraine’s for the king’s affections. Mary was said to be ‘grown lean with hearing her commended, and I believe has never slept since Lady Tankerville has taken her place at the King’s commerce-table’.56 But Lady Tankerville’s departure cheered her up immeasurably.

  Mary also saw off a challenge from the warm-hearted Maid of Honour Anna Maria Mordaunt, ‘as good as she was silly’, who had likewise taken the king’s fancy with her handsome face and the buxom big ‘breasts of an overgrown wet nurse’. Yet the supposedly ‘silly’ Miss Mordaunt was sensible enough to turn down the proffered post of royal mistress. Refusing to become a royal playmate, she remained ‘a Maid of Honour in the literal sense, and not in the usual [sexually licentious] acceptation of that word’ until she married and became the respectable Mrs Poyntz.57

  Mary gained another victory over the youthful and bashful Miss MacKenzie. The ‘prettiest creature that ever was looked on’, she was clearly cut out to become a great favourite at court. She was appointed as a dresser to Princess Louisa, but unfortunately her immediate superior in the royal household was Louisa’s governess, Mary Deloraine. According to John Hervey at least, Mary was so envious of Miss MacKenzie’s beauty that she made ‘her cry regularly once or twice a day, by putt
ing her out of countenance and telling her of her Scotch Highland awkwardness’.

  During one embarrassing dinner for the members of the household then in waiting, Miss MacKenzie found herself being manhandled. Intending to demonstrate her theory that the girl had thin hair, Mary yanked off Miss MacKenzie’s headdress ‘crying, “Look at her, do you see how bald she is?” The poor girl coloured like scarlet’, John Hervey continued. ‘Her Ladyship is so good to treat the court with such farces.’58

  Humiliating her helpless subordinates may have been cruel, but rumour claimed that Mary Deloraine could be even crueller.

  When Miss MacKenzie fell ill, everyone at court assumed that Mary had administered poison.59

  *

  George II was well accustomed to the self-dramatisation, the histrionic storms and sunshine which were unavoidable when keeping company with his daughters’ governess. He often spent the evening playing cards in the princesses’ apartments, ‘constraining them, tiring himself, and talking a little bawdy to Lady Deloraine’.60 Over time, bawdy talk led on to other things.

  According to Mary herself, she put up quite a fight against George II’s advances, and surrendered only in the summer of 1737. Then she was heard bragging that ‘the King had been very importunate these two years, telling her that it was mere unkindness and crossness that made her refuse him’. Surely her husband Mr Wyndham wouldn’t mind, George II had wheedled.

  In 1737, it became generally known that Mary Deloraine had become his mistress. She showed off about it so much that ‘the most incredulous now began to cease doubting of His Majesty’s tasting all the pleasures with Lady Deloraine which she was capable of bestowing’. All the courtiers – John Hervey among them – were forced to admit that, unlikely though it seemed, the king had made ‘the governess of his two youngest daughters his whore’.