Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court
Page 33
17. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 507–8.
18. Ibid., p. 539.
19. Ibid., p. 610.
20. Ibid., p. 604.
21. HMC Egmont, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 307.
22. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, pp. 604–5; Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, p. 117.
23. HMC Egmont, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 304.
24. Duchess of Marlborough to the second Earl of Stair (20 June 1738), quoted in Cunningham (1857), Vol. 1, p. clii.
25. HMC Egmont, Vol. 2 (1923), p. 503.
26. Grundy (1999), p. 383.
27. Kensington Public Library, ‘Extra illustrated’ edition of Thomas Faulkner, History and Antiquities of Kensington (London, 1820) (3-volume version), Vol. 3, item 258; Gaunt and Knight (1988–9), Vol. 2, p. 487.
28. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 20, p. 88 (17 August 1749).
29. General Evening Post, issue 5674 (22 February 1770), Baron Bielfield, ‘A Character of the celebrated Countess of Yarmouth’.
30. HMC 11th Report, p. 356, Ashe Windham to [Charles, third Viscount Townshend?] (22 June 1738).
31. Duchess of Marlborough to the second Earl of Stair (20 June 1738), quoted in Cunningham (1857), Vol. 1, p. clii.
32. General Evening Post, issue 5674 (22 February 1770), Baron Bielfield, ‘A Character of the celebrated Countess of Yarmouth’.
33. Hervey (1744), pp. 16–17.
34. General Evening Post, issue 5674 (22 February 1770), Baron Bielfield, ‘A Character of the celebrated Countess of Yarmouth’.
35. BL Add MS 6856, ff. 1–5.
36. Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, pp. 118–19.
37. Daily Journal, issue 1442, p. 2 (30 August 1725).
38. Daily Post, issue 3516 (25 December 1730); BL Add MS 22229, f. 49, Lord Wentworth to his father the Earl of Strafford (26 December 1730).
39. Daily Courant, issue 5525 (21 December 1733).
40. Thomson (1847), Countess of Pomfret to Mrs Clayton (7 August 1731), Vol. 2, p. 49.
41. Jonathan Swift, Directions to Servants (London, 1745), p. 93.
42. Ilchester (1950), p. 149.
43. Thomson (1847), Countess of Pembroke to Mrs Clayton (n.d.) Vol. 1, p. 227.
44. BL Add MS 27732, f. 57v, Henrietta Howard to Lord Essex (19 November n.y.).
45. London Evening Post, issue 995 (4 April 1734).
46. General Evening Post, issue 241 (15 April 1735).
47. SRO 941/47/4, p. 226, John Hervey to Stephen Fox (30 September 1731).
48. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 460.
49. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 745.
50. Ibid., p. 919; Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, p. 118.
51. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 491.
52. SRO 941/47/4, p. 225, John Hervey to Stephen Fox (30 September 1731).
53. Ibid., p. 323, John Hervey to Ste Fox (21 December 1732).
54. Ilchester (1950), pp. 101, 109.
55. London Evening Post, issue 1761 (24 February 1739).
56. SRO 941/47/4, pp. 169–70, John Hervey to Ste Fox (4 September 1731).
57. Franklin (1993), p. 97.
58. SRO 941/47/4, p. 226, John Hervey to Ste Fox (30 September 1731).
59. William Drogo Montagu, seventh duke of Manchester, Court and Society from Elizabeth to Anne, edited from the papers at Kimbolton (London, 1864), Vol. 2, p. 330.
60. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 498.
61. Ibid., Vol. 3, pp. 744–8.
62. ‘An Epistle from Ld. Lovel to Lord Chesterfield at Bath, Wrote by Mr Poulteney’, quoted in James (1929), p. 230.
63. SRO 941/47/4, p. 337, John Hervey to Ste Fox (30 December 1731); Franklin (1993), p. 97.
64. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, pp. 919–20.
65. Quoted in Harvey (1994; 2001), p. 57.
66. Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, p. 118.
67. Thomson (1847), Vol. 1, p. 240, Countess of Pembroke to Mrs Clayton (n.d.).
68. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 853.
69. Quoted in Borman (2007), p. 95.
70. Brian Fitzgerald (Ed.), Correspondence of Emily, Duchess of Leinster (Dublin,1949–57), Vol. 1, p. 67 (26 April 1759).
71. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 1, pp. 330–1.
72. SRO 941/48/1, p. 58, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (20 July1744).
73. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 1, pp. 330–2.
74. Hailes (1788), p. 120.
75. ‘Account of the court of George the First’ in Wharncliffe (1861), Vol. 1, p. 125.
76. Cowper (1864), p. 132.
77. Caroline to Melusine (5 June 1727), quoted in Wilkins (1901), Vol. 2, pp. 26–7.
78. Walpole, Reminiscences (1818 edn), pp. 28–9.
79. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 33, p. 529 (28 September 1786).
80. Wilkins (1901), Vol. 1, p. 251.
81. Sedgwick (1939), p. 37, George III to Bute (? winter 1759–60).
82. Wraxall (1904), p. 255.
83. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 5.6 (April, 1736), p. 230.
84. James Howard Harris, third Earl of Malmesbury (Ed.), Letters of the First Earl of Malmesbury (London, 1870), Vol. 1, p. 80 (3 December 1754).
85. John Cleland, Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London, 1748–9; Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 41.
86. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 507.
87. SRO 941/48/1, p. 40, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (2 March 1744).
88. BL Add MS 32896, f. 140v, Newcastle to Lord Hardwicke (copy) (28 September 1759).
89. Quoted in Edwards (1947), p. 7.
90. William Cavendish, fourth duke of Devonshire, Memoranda on the State of Affairs, 1759–1762, Eds P. D. Brown and K. W. Schweizer, Camden Society, fourth series, Vol. 27 (London, 1982), p. 50 (30 October 1760).
91. Aubrey Newman, The World Turned Inside Out: New Views on George II, inaugural lecture, Leicester University (1988), p. 6.
92. Coxe (1798b), Vol. 1, p. 271.
93. J. C. D. Clark (Ed.), The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave (Cambridge, 1988), p. 147 (1758).
94. BL Add MS 38507, f. 248, Lord Townshend to the king (24 September 1728).
95. BL Add MS 32703, f. 282r (26 August 1744).
96. BL Stowe MS 308, f. 4r.
97. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 340.
98. Owen (1973), p. 123.
99. Anon., George the Third, His Court and Family (London, 1820), p. 88.
100. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 341.
101. BL Add MS 9176, f. 34r, old Horace Walpole to Robert Trevor (22 February 1740).
102. BL Add MS 23814, f. 597 (12/23 June 1743).
103. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 436.
104. F. J. Manning (Ed.), The Williamson Letters, 1748–1765, publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, Vol. XXXIV (Luton, 1954), p. 43, Tidy Williamson to Edmund Williamson (5 June 1759).
105. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 462.
106. Joan Glasheen, The Secret People of the Palaces (London, 1998), p. 112.
107. Pöllnitz (1739), Vol. 2, p. 460.
108. Richard Campbell, The London tradesman. Being a compendious view of all the trades, professions, arts, both liberal and mechanic, now practised (London, 1747), p.212.
109. Llanover (1861), Vol. 2, p. 28.
110. Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to a Lady’, in F. W. Bateson (Ed.), Alexander Pope, Epistles to Several Persons (London and New Haven, 1961), p. 64.
111. SRO 941/48/1, p. 367, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (25 September 1759).
112. Ibid., p. 206, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (24 October 1747).
113. Mowl (2006), p. 230.
114. The Walpole Society, Vol. 22 (Oxford, 1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 115.
115. BL Add MS 75358, William Kent to the Earl of Burlington (28 November 1738).
116. Quoted in Wilson (1984), p. 85.
117. Highfill, Burnim and Langhams (1973), Vol. 2, p. 451.
118. Walpole (1771), Vol. 4, p. 116.
119. Chatsworth MS, William Kent to Lady Burlington (7 October 1738), quoted in Wilson (1984),
p. 87.
120. The Walpole Society, Vol. 22 (Oxford, 1933–4) (Vertue III), p. 140.
121. BL Add MS 22227, f. 103, Juliana Wentworth (Peter’s wife) to Lord Strafford (8 December 1729).
122. Cartwright (1883), pp. 533–4.
123. London Evening Post, issue 1742 (11 January 1739).
124. Cartwright (1883), pp. 533–4.
125. BL Add 22229, f. 217v (1737).
126. HMC Egmont, Vol. 3 (1923), p. 240; Cannon (2004).
127. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 17, p. 337 (18 February 1741/2); Cannon (2004).
128. Thomson (1847), Vol. 2, p. 349.
129. Sherburn (1956), Vol. 1, p. 412, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Alexander Pope (17 June 1717).
130. Stanhope (1774), Vol. 1, p. 287.
131. Horace Walpole writes on 8 October 1742 of events that had clearly taken place very recently. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 18, p. 71 (8 October 1742).
132. John Hervey quoted in Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 18, p. 82 (16 October 1742 OS).
133. Croker (1824), Vol. 2, p. 65, Lord Chesterfield to Lady Suffolk (17 August 1733).
134. Lewis (1937–83) Vol. 17, p. 188 (2 November 1741 OS).
135. Ibid., Vol. 18, p. 71 (8 October 1742 OS).
136. Franklin (1993), p. 97.
137. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 18, p. 71 (8 October 1742 OS).
138. Ibid., Vol. 21, p. 191 (14 April 1758).
139. Daily Advertiser, issue 3992 (3 November 1743).
140. Daily Advertiser, issue 3998 (10 November 1743).
141. London Evening Post, issue 2655 (10 November 1744).
142. Hervey (1744), pp. 16–17, 12.
TEN
The Circle Breaks
‘I now behold only a withering King.’1
(Horace Walpole)
On Friday 24 October 1760, a seventy-six-year-old George II was dining at Kensington Palace, his residence for the entire summer. What would prove to be his final meal consisted of soup, salmon, mutton, ham, sweetbreads, ‘ravioles’, prawns and jelly.2 Later that night he passed the hours between nine and eleven quietly playing cards, as usual, with his daughter Princess Amelia and his mistress Amalie. Although there’d been many contenders for her title, Amalie had so far seen off her challengers and was once again the king’s paramount paramour.
During this evening of mild domestic activity, something unusual was happening to George II’s heart. Over the years, its muscles had been starved of oxygen by the layers of fat narrowing their feeder arteries. (This had caused his long-familiar chest pains.) The weakened right ventricle of his heart was now pumping under immense pressure and was on the point of losing the battle to bludgeon blood round his body.
While the physical organ was wearing out and its beat softening, the king’s heart in the metaphysical sense, too, had never been softer.
This was visible in his surprisingly sympathetic recent behaviour towards those he loved.
*
Kensington in 1760 was very different from the animated, vibrant community which Henrietta had relinquished in 1734. Caroline’s illness had seen the beginning of the end of the high life there. After her death, the king had ‘locked up half the palace’, and during these later years there was ‘scarce enough company to pay for lighting the candles’.3 Time no longer mattered, and even the clocks were ‘very foul and out of repair’.4 Horace Walpole gives an evocative description of the geriatric court at Kensington: its members were ‘seldom young: they sun themselves in a window, like flies in autumn, past even buzzing’, all ready ‘to be swept away in the first hurricane of a new reign’.5
The aged king, seen for once with a smile on his lips. His heart softened towards the end of his life
The king had now reached a greater age than any of his predecessors upon the throne. The only people he still wanted to see were his old friends and, even among them, he preferred the ones who had been ‘beauties in his younger days’.6
A visiting Frenchman vividly conjures up a former femme fatale of the court as she tries to maintain former standards in an increasingly grotesque parody of glamour. She travels in her sedan chair to an evening drawing room, her face ‘painted up to the eyes … the glasses of the vehicle are drawn up that the winds of Heaven may not visit the powder and paint too roughly’.
Encased in glass like a natural-history specimen, she ‘does not ill resemble the foetus of a hippopotamus in a brandy bottle’.7
*
Kensington and the courtiers had changed; so had the world outside the palace gates. Britain’s support of Austria against the Prussians and the French had looked likely to embroil her in continental warfare at the time of the battle of the mistresses in 1742. Matters came to a head the following year, and George II’s military enthusiasm got the better of concerns for his safety and senility. His second great personal military triumph took place at the advanced age of fifty-nine.
The location was the battlefield of Dettingen, in what is now south-west Germany; the enemies were the French, and the engagement was part of the War of the Austrian Succession. This was a gallant cause: the defence of the right of Maria Theresa of Austria to inherit her father’s throne despite her gender. A soldier present saw cannonballs fly ‘within half a yard’ of George II’s head. When it was suggested that he should leave the field, he answered, ‘Don’t tell me of danger, I’ll be even with them!’ ‘He is certainly the boldest man I ever saw,’ one eyewitness gushed. George II was undoubtedly bold, and inspiring too, as he yelled: ‘Now, boys, – Now for the honour of England, fire, and behave brave, and the French will soon run.’8
After the success of the 1743 campaign that included the king’s own victory at Dettingen, ‘female loyalty was brilliantly displayed’ in Kensington Gardens. A company of ladies raised subscriptions to pay for a ‘gala, and rural illumination, that darkened the stars’. In a last burst of splendour, Kensington Palace was illuminated with wax lights and ‘the trees at a distance, in front of every angle, were equally resplendent’.9
But the advantage gained at Dettingen was not followed up, and war weariness set in during the latter part of 1743. British troops were pulled out of the continent in 1745 and brought home to deal with the second major uprising of the Jacobites. The outlook was distinctly dicey: Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender (or ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’), had landed in Scotland; he and his rebel forces had achieved early successes against the British army and now they were heading south towards London.
During the weeks of the rebel advance, the tension in the drawing room mounted inexorably. Yet George II kept up an impressive show of sangfroid: ‘void of the least appearance of fear … with cheerfulness enough to give spirit to others’. One person present acknowledged the enormous strain the king must have endured to maintain this display: ‘I never saw him I think show so much of true greatness as he then did.’10
When they reached Derby, though, the Jacobite forces lost heart and turned back. George II was triumphant over the Young Pretender, just as George I had vanquished his father the Old Pretender in 1715. The British were extremely affronted that an enemy had dared to invade so deeply into their realm, and they exhibited a great surge of patriotic pride in their country and king. Having survived this crisis, the Hanoverians seemed at last to be safe and secure upon the throne. A visitor to a crowded, celebratory court reported that ‘I never saw anybody in such glee as the King.’11
In George II’s extreme old age, though, a new, protracted and more global conflict had broken out: the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War). It all began in the Ohio valley, where British and French colonists came to blows with the Native Americans. This local dust-up escalated in due course into the first-ever ‘World War’, and the competition between France and England flared up as far afield as the Philippines and Canada.
In 1756, there was major political upheaval in Europe when Britain abandoned its old ally Austria in favour of Prussia and once again declared war against
France. Suddenly, though, there was a string of ignominious military defeats on both sides of the Atlantic – the loss of Minorca, defeat in Carolina, an unsuccessful attack on Ticonderoga – a series of disasters which brought the government into contempt and ‘much diminished the national affection borne towards the Sovereign’.12 More dissatisfaction was caused by the creeping taxes – now newly applied to coaches and servants, for example – which were needed to pay for all this bellicosity.
In his old age George II was still to be seen reviewing the troops from the ramparts of the garden wall at Kensington, and he remained a soldier at heart. In 1759, the recklessly aggressive James Wolfe was appointed general of the fighting forces in Canada. When complaints were made on the grounds that Wolfe was mad, the sparky old king famously retorted: ‘Mad, is he? I wish he would bite some of my other generals.’13
And something of Wolfe’s mad fighting spirit did rub off on the rest of the army and navy. George II had been forced by the ‘misfortunes and disgraces’ of 1756 to invite William Pitt to take over the government and conduct of national affairs. Despite the king’s dislike of Pitt and his ‘utmost reluctance’ to work with him, the new ‘Prime Minister’ performed magnificently as a war leader.
His strategy was ‘to win North America on the plains of Europe’, forcing the French to fight there as well as in the further theatre of India. By 1759, Britain’s army and navy contained record numbers of troops:71,000 in the fleet and 52,000 available to fight on land.14
And they won her the upper hand at last. In the final eighteen months before George II’s quiet last supper at Kensington, he and Pitt had achieved huge success upon the world stage. The French had been driven from Canada; Britain’s great empire had expanded rapidly. In a sharp contrast with earlier years, the king by 1760 ‘certainly enjoyed great and universal popularity’.
It was to Mr Pitt that he owed ‘this gratifying distinction at the close of life, when Victory was said to have erected her altar between his aged knees’.15
*
Despite these military triumphs, nothing could rejuvenate the court. It was a long time since guests had found ‘the square full of coaches; the rooms full of company, everything gay and laughing’.16