Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  A little after seven he went into the water-closet – the German valet de chambre heard a noise, louder than the royal wind, listened, heard something like a groan, ran in, and found the hero of Oudenarde and Dettingen on the floor, with a gash on his right temple, by falling against the bureau.116

  Walpole painted the scene with his customary relish for the bizarre. A less sensational account records Schröder’s small but painful dilemma: hearing an ‘unusual noise in the room’, he had to think very hard before he ‘ventured to open the door, which he had never done before’.117

  There was the king, lying on the floor, his head hurt by his fall, obviously dying. His heart had given out at last. The valet lifted the king onto the bed. While Horace Walpole claimed that ‘he tried to speak, could not, and expired’, there were other, rival accounts that recorded a few final muttered words, and the last words of kings were always a matter of much moment.118

  It has been said that the dying king called out for Amalie, his mistress, and certainly the noise he produced sounded like her name.119 This fact has been taken to confirm the king’s unpleasant nature: unfaithful to his wife to the last. (It is also certain that his faithful mistress Amalie would have fulfilled the bargain between them and been a steadfast companion to the very end.)

  In fact, though, the king’s inability to speak clearly caused a good deal of confusion. It was his daughter, not his mistress, for whom he called.

  Princess Amelia, known to the English as Princess Emily, was the child of a polyglot family. She signed her letters as ‘Amalie’, and so she was known by her father.120 The king wanted to die in the presence of the only person still living who’d been present at Caroline’s death.

  So it was Princess Amelia who was summoned, though with the misunderstanding there was too much delay. Because she was now a little deaf, she did not catch the servants’ muffled words and only discovered for herself that her father was dead when she touched his lifeless body laid out on the bed.121

  And it was a terrible experience for her. Amelia had been forcibly parted from her father in her youth, and there is no doubt that she at times had cordially hated him, griping ‘Jesus! How tiresome he is!’; complaining about him; doing her best to avoid him.122 Unlike her seven siblings, though, she had also come to feel something like sympathy for him towards the end, and now found herself subject to strange emotions.

  She was hurled ‘into an agony’ by her father’s death, ‘this shock so sudden, so unexpected, and so violent’.123 Now Amelia and Amalie were probably the only people who genuinely grieved for George II.

  *

  So sudden was the king’s death that an investigation was needed, and his body was opened up. The right ventricle of his heart was found to have ‘burst, and the pericardium filled with a great quantity of coagulated blood’. The left ventricle was empty, and the ‘coats of all the vessels were worn away extremely thin’. No wonder the king ‘had been frequently out of order of late’.124

  Nevertheless, the heart of the palace beat on, and, after heading his blank page ‘this morning his most gracious Majesty departed this life’, the kitchen clerk stolidly enumerated the supplies the kitchen would still require for the day: five ducks, two dozen larks, two quarts of shrimps, two barrels of oysters, two pecks of French beans and twelve dozen peaches.125 Hungry mouths still waited to be fed.

  The Lord Chamberlain now ordered the same court mourning as had been decreed for George I back in 1727:black bombazines, black crape hoods, gloves and crape fans; the whole palace of St James’s was to be hung with black.126 At another royal death, that of Princess Caroline three years previously, ‘everybody that think themselves anybody’ wore deep mourning, and ladies who’d worn even black flounces on their skirts had been told to remove them.127

  Now, once again, the many who considered themselves intimate enough with the royal family to wear mourning made an assault upon the shops, and over 1,500 yards of crape were sold by one retailer in Bath on the Sunday night.128 Those unrecognised by the shopkeepers as regular customers, or those with a ‘Right Honourable’ before their name, had to pay a shilling more than others for the same stuff.129

  By Saturday night London was completely empty of hackney horses, as so many messengers had been sent to take the news to ‘persons of distinction’ all over the kingdom; and every hour brought new arrivals to London as the nobility began to gather for the funeral that would follow.130

  The change of monarch meant that the court was once again full of ‘hopes and fears’, and that even the most potent of George II’s ‘great lords look[ed] as if they dreaded wanting bread’.131

  The king’s funeral ceremonies began at 7 p.m. on 9 November, when his bowels were carried from Kensington to the royal vault in Henry VII’s chapel, Westminster Abbey. The bowels led the way because they’d been removed from the corpse during the process of embalming it and needed to be disposed of first. The rest of his body followed the next day, carried to its hearse by twelve faithful Yeomen of the Guard. On 11 November, they carried it from the Prince’s Chamber at Westminster, where it had rested overnight, into the vault itself.132 The king had given instructions that he wanted his and Caroline’s dust to mingle in a joint coffin.133

  He now rejoined his wife, the love of his life.

  So, at length, George II was buried, a king who had never perhaps quite lived or loved well enough, but who had done his best to live up to his idea of his job under trying circumstances. At his birth nobody could have predicted the chain of coincidences that would lead to his becoming king of Great Britain, and many of his hopes of personal happiness had been crushed by the unlucky crown.

  Now he was respectfully mourned, and sermons were preached on the text: ‘he died in a good old age, full of days, riches, and honour’.134 ‘Posterity will celebrate him as a good Prince,’ mused one of his courtiers, ‘tho’ many of the present age knew him not to have been an amiable man.’135

  Only a month later, though, one of George II’s former subjects could write that ‘he seems already to be almost forgotten’.136 This was partly because there was now a vigorous young king to excite people. Luckily George III felt himself more equal than his grandfather to the task of ruling, more British than Hanoverian. He famously declared that, unlike his predecessors, he’d been born and educated in the country, and gloried ‘in the name of Britain’.137

  He was resolved, too, ‘to introduce a new custom’: that all his ‘family should live well together’, because he was ‘very sorry for the misunderstandings that there had formerly been’.138

  Soon Henrietta was once again required, for she was one of the few people who could teach the court about the ceremonies now to be followed. At the coronation of Queen Charlotte, George III’s new young wife, which took place in September 1761, it was Henrietta who best remembered the jewels and rules that Queen Caroline had worn and obeyed in 1727, and her advice was sought.139

  *

  So who were the winners and losers of the second Georgian age, which ended so ignominiously in the water closet on 25 October 1760?

  Two days after the king’s death, Horace Walpole paid a visit to Kensington Palace, the scene of so many triumphs and disasters for our courtiers. He was on his way to see Lady Yarmouth, the former Amalie von Wallmoden, who’d managed to hold off all her rivals until the very end of the battle of the mistresses.

  Much had changed since Horace Walpole had last tripped into the porter’s lodge of the palace. Although he and his father had been so closely associated with the old court, he was not even recognised on that autumn morning. ‘No one knew me’, he wrote. ‘They asked my name – when they heard it, they did not seem ever to have heard it before, even in that house. I waited half an hour in a lodge with a footman of Lady Yarmouth’s.’

  Yet he took his loss of prestige with his customary dry philosophy: ‘I smiled to myself.’140

  When he finally breached the palace’s new defences, Walpole found that his old friend Amalie w
as emotionally, but not financially, distressed. There would now be little to detain her in Britain, except the ‘£9,000 in bank bills and 11 bags with a 100 gold sovereigns in each’ that the king had left for her in his bureau. Alongside the money he gave her his ‘2 gold snuff boxes’, each containing a cherished miniature picture of Amalie herself.141 It was a reasonable, but not astronomical, compensation for the mistress who’d never really possessed her lover’s heart. (Jane Keen, the palace’s old housekeeper, would also die a fairly wealthy woman: the estate she left included £3,500 and a portrait of herself wearing diamond earrings.142)

  Amalie soon returned to her birthplace in Hanover, and died there of ‘a cancer in her breast’ only five years later, aged sixty-one.143 At her death, a rather wild report claimed that she’d made so much money out of George II that she’d been able to leave her two sons ‘a million of crowns’.144 This vast sum was probably plucked from the air by the sort of people who thought, wrongly, that a German royal mistress was bound to have made enormous profit from her position. Her son Johann Ludwig, who was George II’s final if unacknowledged child, built a mansion near Herrenhausen, entered the Hanoverian army, served in the French revolutionary war and died in 1811.145 His house is now a museum of cartoons.

  Amalie’s ties with her unofficial step-family, George II’s children, were obviously not strong enough to long survive his death. William Augustus, the fat Duke of Cumberland, had suffered a stroke just two months before his father’s final heart attack. From this he recovered the power of speech but not of full movement, and he was not popular with the new courtiers now surrounding his nephew George III. Butcher-like to the end, he talked about ‘the vermin the court is now full of’ under the new regime; ‘vermin’ was a term he had also used when flushing out and killing the Jacobites in 1745.146 He died in 1765.

  Meanwhile, Molly Hervey’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Chudleigh, was reported to have been deeply upset by the demise of George II, her quondam lover, although her grief was not taken entirely seriously. One person thought her weeping was caused by a bad oyster rather than the death of a close attachment.147 Perhaps she was regretting the time when she’d been so close to the prize of becoming chief mistress, or perhaps she was mourning the loss of a youth not to be regained by ‘sticking roses and sweet peas in one’s hair, as Miss Chudleigh still does!’148

  Whether or not she was legitimately married to the Duke of Kingston, and whether or not she was truly a duchess, no one will ever know. If her first marriage to Augustus Hervey was in fact valid, she became a legitimate countess at least, because his elder brother died before him and he inherited the family title.

  *

  ‘The court’s a golden, but a fatal circle’ reads the inscription to Court tales: or, a History of the Amours of the Present Nobility, and the real winners were those who had escaped from the gilded cage.149

  Molly Hervey was left tranquil by the king’s death. She looked forward enthusiastically to the reign of George III and continued to enjoy the company of Horace Walpole and her other witty friends. She ‘gave dinners, and was always at home in an evening to a select company: men of letters and beaux esprits’, preserving into old age the ‘uncommon remains’ of her beauty.150 Walpole’s devotion to her was all the stronger because – and we would expect no less from Molly – she combined ‘great goodness with great severity’ towards him, and was always glad to take him down a peg or two.151

  Henrietta had likewise proved herself to be, as Lord Peterborough put it, a

  wonderful creature! a woman of reason!

  Never grave out of pride, never gay out of season.152

  George II’s death brought with it the end of her court pension, but at the age of seventy-one she retained ‘spirits and cleverness and imagination’. Horace Walpole worshipped her for her conversation and her ‘old court-knowledge’.153 At nearly eighty she still had ‘all her senses as perfect as ever’, except, of course, for her long-lost hearing.154 Walpole, addicted to her anecdotes, lamented their life in Twickenham when he was detained in London, and longed for its ‘roses, strawberries, & banks of the river’.155 ‘Pray keep a little summer for me,’ he begged her, and ‘I will give you a bushel of politics, when I come to Marblehill, for a teacup of strawberries & cream.’156

  When she’d left court in 1734, a friend rightly commended Henrietta on her wise choice of pleasures: ‘old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read; you may be sure of enjoying all these … in a more perfect degree than his majesty or his queen’.157

  Apart from the devoted Walpole, Henrietta’s life was now lived among the recollected characters of times long gone. One of her few surviving friends thought of her as a sage, a wise woman well left to herself, ‘to think of what is past, so as to be able to judge of what is to come’.158 We leave Henrietta and Horace talking together happily about the gory, glory days of the 1730s, celebrating the fulfilment of a wish so often expressed when she was in court bondage and put into the words of her former friend Alexander Pope:

  … quickly bear me hence

  To wholesome solitude, the nurse of sense:

  Here contemplation prunes her ruffled wings,

  And the free soul looks down to pity kings.159

  Princess Amelia was another of Horace Walpole’s friends, although they had frequent fallings-out. After losing her palace apartments following her father’s death, the princess became another of the formidable retired court ladies of west London, buying Gunnersbury House in Ealing, Middlesex.160 She spent the rest of her life criticising her nephew, George III, who ignored her, and left her estate to her unlucky sister Mary’s children.

  Molly, Henrietta and Princess Amelia all endured vicious attacks from their contemporaries: Molly for her status-consciousness and shyness; Henrietta for her bland conversation and lack of exceptional looks; Amelia for her bluntness and rudeness. But this was really because all three women had dared to be different. They could not help discomfiting the world by giving it a glimpse of what women were not supposed to have: wit, humour and inner resources.

  *

  The other survivor among the courtiers was Peter the Wild Boy. In 1760, he was still living on a farm in Berkhamsted, the little market town just north-west of London. It sits in a shallow valley, in low, rolling country, with neat fields, wooded hills and snug timber-framed buildings along a high street larded with coaching inns. In and about this town Peter enjoyed a life of quiet enjoyment and wore an iron collar marked with his name and address so that people could bring him home again when he wandered off.

  Peter in later years looked ‘just like busts of Socrates’. No one knew how old he really was

  Lodged with Farmer Fenn at Broadway Farm, he would exasperate his master by helpfully loading a cart with dung, then unloading it again for pleasure. He remained ‘exceedingly timid and gentle in his nature’ and ‘would suffer himself to be governed by a child’. He was fond of gin, and of onions, which he would eat raw like apples. In spring he would sing all day long, and if music were played he would dance and caper about ‘till he was almost quite exhausted with fatigue’. In the autumn he would still show ‘a strange fondness for stealing away into the woods, where he would feed eagerly’ upon acorns.

  Only when bad weather approached would Peter begin ‘growling and howling, and showing great disorder’. He loved to watch a fire and sometimes stood with his face turned to the sun; he liked ‘to be out on a starry night’.161

  Nothing could have been further from life in the gloomy, glittering world of the Georgian court.

  Notes

  1. Brooke (1985), Vol. 2, p. 3.

  2. TNA LS 9/177 (24 October 1760).

  3. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 20, p. 88 (17 August 1749 OS); p. 89 (12 September 1749 OS).

  4. BL Add MS 20101, f. 49r (29 January 1759).

  5. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 20, p. 438 (5 July 1754).

  6. Clark (1988), p. 147 (1758).

  7. Simond (1815), Vol.
1, p. 162.

  8. Mr Kendal of Lord Ashburnham’s Troop, writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 13 (July 1743), p. 387.

  9. Kensington Public Library, ‘Extra illustrated’ edition of Thomas Faulkner, History and Antiquities of Kensington (London, 1820) (3-volume version), Vol. 3, item 205b (17 August 1743).

  10. HMC, 14th Report, appendix 9, p. 523, ‘note on the rebellion of 1745’.

  11. Quoted in Black (2007), p. 197.

  12. Wraxall (1904), p. 257.

  13. Cannon (2004).

  14. Frank McLynn, 1759, The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London, 2004), p. 233.

  15. Wraxall (1904), pp. 257–8.

  16. Cowper (1864), p. 143.

  17. John Wood, An Essay towards a Description of Bath (London, 1749), Vol. 2, preface.

  18. BL Add MS 20101, f. 36v (4 December, n.y.).

  19. Walpole, Reminiscences (1818 edn), p. 101.

  20. Halsband (1965–7), Vol. 2, p. 306 (29/18 June 1743).

  21. SRO 941/53/1, p. 210, William Hervey’s commonplace book.

  22. Quoted in Stuart (1936), p. 119.

  23. Mrs Russell to Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Russell (August 1743), quoted in Sydenham Hervey, Journals of the Hon. William Hervey (Bury St Edmunds, 1906), introduction, p. xxxix.

  24. SRO 941/48/1, p. 191, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (18 November 1743).

  25. Ibid., p. 377, Mary Hervey to the Reverend Edmund Morris (15 December 1760).

  26. Lewis (1937–83), Vol. 23, p. 78 (2 December 1768).

  27. Ibid., Vol. 33, p. 37 (7 August 1778).

  28. Elizabeth Mavor, The Virgin Duchess, A Study in Survival: The Life of the Duchess of Kingston (London, 1964), pp. 38–9.