Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  The ancient scandal was constantly raked up around the courts of Europe. In 1716, Princess Caroline received a petition

  asking her to consider, just and God-fearing as she is known to be, that the only rightful heir to the kingdom is the one known as the Pretender, as he was King James II’s son as surely as her husband was Count Königsmarck’s.

  ‘How unspeakably insolent, if this really was said to the Princess!’ commented the Duchess of Orléans as she gleefully passed on the gossip. ‘England is a mad country,’ she concluded.68

  *

  At the point when Sophia had fallen in love with Count Königsmarck, she had long endured rampant infidelity from her husband. When he appeared in the drawing room at St James’s Palace in London, George I was usually accompanied by two women assumed by everyone to be his long-term German mistresses.

  First there was Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenberg, usually known as Melusine, a tall thin lady known by the disapproving English as ‘the May Pole’. Next to her stood Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, a short fat female disparagingly called ‘The Elephant’.

  When George I had arrived in London in 1714, his companions Melusine and Sophia Charlotte came in for endless criticism. The low life of London were ‘highly diverted’ by the new king’s seraglio.69 The two ladies were just ‘ugly old whores’, the newspapers claimed, and would have found few clients even in the brothels of Drury Lane.70

  The skeletal Melusine was said to be ‘duller than the King and consequently did not find that he was so’, while the obese Sophia Charlotte had ‘fierce black eyes, large and rolling … two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed’.71 Lord Chesterfield, one of the king’s cruellest critics, claimed that no woman came amiss to George I ‘if she was but very willing, very fat, and had great breasts’.72 Indeed, a confectioner in the royal household had to be dismissed for using ‘indecent expressions concerning the King & Madam Kielmansegg’.73

  But Sophia Charlotte and Melusine were thoroughly and deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented by the British, who did not – or would not – attempt to like foreigners. Truth at the Georgian court was even stranger than fiction, for Sophia Charlotte von Kielmansegg, ‘The Elephant’, was actually the king’s half-sister. The princes of Europe usually maintained both wives and mistresses, creating a tangled jungle of official and unofficial children. George I’s father had enjoyed an affair with his chief minister’s wife; Sophia Charlotte was its result.

  Despite all the talk, there is no evidence that George I and Sophia Charlotte had an incestuous relationship, and indeed an ambitious courtier in search of power thought himself on ‘a fine road to it by furnishing Madame Kielmansegg both with money and a lover’ of her own.74

  George I remained silent upon the subject of his estranged wife, her lover and the murder. The shy king had a will of iron and an iron-clad ability to hold a grievance for years.

  So there were unhealed wounds deep down in his relationship with his son. They allowed the ridiculous quarrel over the choice of a godfather to become the visible expression of an antagonism much more entrenched and damaging.

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  By 1720, everyone was sick of the inconvenience and unhappiness caused by the ‘christening quarrel’. They all hoped that the St James’s Palace drawing room would be the setting for a happy resolution.

  As early as February 1718, Princess Caroline had been using the rules of polite social engagement to force the king to acknowledge her presence and to speak to her. A journalist congratulated his country upon ‘the near prospect there is of a reconciliation between his Majesty and his Royal Highness. The Princess of Wales’s appearance at court can forebode no less.’75

  This, however, was only a lull in a two-year war of attrition. The submission or apology that the king required of his son remained unforthcoming. In May of the next year, when George I went to Hanover for the summer, he set up a Council of Regency from which Prince George Augustus was again pointedly excluded. He forbade his son and daughter-in-law from using St James’s Palace in his absence, and announced that court gatherings would be hosted by his three grandchildren, the little princesses.

  It was a turning of the political tide that eventually pressured the royal family into making more serious attempts at appeasement. Forces more potent than themselves were in motion. The turnaround was forced by the involvement of Sir Robert Walpole, the man who hoped to become all-powerful among the politicians.

  Walpole, whom ‘nothing terrifies, nothing astonishes’, was something like the country’s first ‘Prime Minister’.76 He certainly acted as if he were, though the title was not yet formalised. At this stage in his career he was still working closely with his brother-in-law, Charles Townshend (who’d later become known as ‘Turnip Townshend’ for his agricultural innovations).

  These two were both Whigs, to be sure, but they were locked in close combat with other Whig factions, such as the one led by their nemeses, the Earls of Stanhope and Sunderland. Walpole once had to be restrained from throwing a candlestick at Stanhope during a Cabinet meeting.77 The enfeebled Tories, meanwhile, remained in disarray, and Walpole and the Whigs ran rings around them.

  As his struggle against his fellow Whigs Stanhope and Sunderland intensified, Walpole began to need new allies. He sought an alliance with the king’s Hanoverian ministers, and he also began to think that a united royal family could provide him with much-needed support. To secure a royal reunion would signal Walpole as the most powerful politician on the scene.

  Though fat and often coarse, Sir Robert had a magnificently magnetic personality. A good speech by him in the House of Commons had ‘as much of natural eloquence and of genius in it as had been heard by any of the audience within those walls’, and ‘whatever he proposes seldom fails of being pass’d’.78 His eloquence persuaded George I that reconciliation with his son was worth what was promised in return: £600,000, to be paid against the debt on the Civil List.

  Walpole managed to convince the House of Commons to agree, and all he now needed was to win over Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline. This too he achieved. Socially, emotionally, politically and financially, they couldn’t afford to hold out against the king any longer.

  But their submission would not be made without heartache. ‘Half frighted, half persuaded’ by Walpole to do his bidding, Princess Caroline in particular did so with many scruples. Weeping, she told her ladies that she considered herself to have been betrayed and her husband bribed.

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  All the pieces were eventually put into place and all the players prepared for Prince George Augustus’s formal apology on St George’s Day, 23 April 1720. He reluctantly wrote the letter of submission that the king required; or, at least, he copied it out from Sir Robert Walpole’s draft. (Walpole had vetted ‘everything beforehand, and it must be as he says’.79)

  When the letter was delivered to St James’s Palace, the king’s secretary came ‘back with a message to the Prince to say that the King would see him’. He ‘at once took his chair and went to St James’s’.

  So Prince George Augustus finally plodded back, with a heavy heart, to the palace from which he had been excluded for two years. Up the back-stairs and into the king’s private closet he went. There he told his father that

  it had been a great grief to him to have been in his displeasure so long; that he was infinitely obliged to His Majesty for this permission of waiting upon him, and that he hoped the rest of his life would be such as the king would never have cause to complain of.

  Then came the painful moment when George I also had to lay aside his anger.

  The King was much dismayed, pale, and could not speak to be heard but by broken sentences, and said several times, ‘Votre conduite, votre conduite [Your conduct, your conduct]’, but the Prince said he could not hear distinctly anything but those words. The prince went after he had stayed about five minutes in the closet.80

  Five short minutes, but they
were enough to make a powerful symbolic statement: father and son were on speaking terms once again.

  In this moment, though, George Augustus was caught in a trap. A fiery man fuelled with an honest rage, he had gone to meet his father in good faith, hoping to be met halfway on the question of right and wrong. Even George I admitted that his son, though bad-tempered and blustery, was at heart simple and straightforward. ‘He is not a liar. He is mad, but he is a trustworthy man,’ the king begrudgingly said.81

  George Augustus expected and deserved a warmer reconciliation than that provided by his father’s muttered complaints.

  From this point on, from this cold and half-hearted reception, he could no longer complain that he was suffering undeservedly from royal displeasure. Father and son were officially reunited. But an emotional resolution was still very far distant. The prince’s grievance remained, and would now begin to fester. He finally understood that there was to be no apology from his father and no reparation for the stolen children.

  The king still considered that the danger represented by the reversionary interest was just too strong to risk a real compromise with his son, and it is impossible to know what either of them really thought about the unspoken matter of the prince’s mother. And reconciliation between the king and his daughter-in-law remained a step too far: ‘The king could not be brought to see the Princess that night, and said, when he was pressed to it several times, “L’occasion se trouvera! [The time will come!]”’

  Yet at this news of an official reconciliation within the royal family, there were the sort of celebrations usually seen after the winning of a battle or the lifting of a siege: ‘The Prince came back, with the Beefeaters round his chair, and hallooing and all marks of joy which could be shown by the multitude.’ To those in the know, it seemed that Prince George Augustus did not share his supporters’ high spirits: ‘he looked grave, and his eyes were red and swelled, as one has seen him on other occasions when he is mightily ruffled. He immediately dismissed all the company.’

  His courtiers were nevertheless ordered to return to Leicester House to report for duty at five that afternoon.

  *

  ‘At five I went’, courtier Mary Cowper later recorded in her diary, ‘and found the guards before the door, and the square full of coaches; the rooms full of company, everything gay and laughing; nothing but kissing and wishing of joy.’

  Noisy celebrations took place at the news that the prince’s court was once more to be welcomed back from the wilderness. Mary Cowper, though, was not alone in feeling unable to forget the hatred and hostility of the last two years. There’d been a complete and in some ways unconvincing volte-face: ‘nobody could conceive that so much joy should be had after so many resolutions never to come to this’. Despite their sense that the reconciliation was an empty charade, the courtiers who had thrown in their lot with the prince and princess tried to act as if everything was right with the world.

  Now it came home to Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline that there was an awful price to be paid for their royal status: they had to pretend to be happy.

  The prince in particular, with his open and forthright character, would find this terribly hard. Mary recorded a telling little interchange between herself and her employers on this supposedly celebratory evening. Her memory of the conversation shows how George Augustus and Caroline could exert an almost magnetic power, winning sincere affection and loyalty from their staff. ‘I wished the Prince joy,’ she recollected, ‘he embraced and kissed me five or six times, and with his usual heartiness when he means sincerely … The Princess burst out in a loud laugh, and said, “So! I think you two always kiss upon great occasions.”’82

  The mixture of physical affection, jovial teasing and heartfelt words reveal the Prince and Princess of Wales at their best. It’s possible to imagine the courtiers devoting their time, their health, their prospects to these people. And the couple won admirers in the most unlikely places. Even the grumpy old Duchess of Marlborough claimed that ‘whatever may be deficient in the late reconcilement’, Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline would ‘never want a full court of the best sort of people that this country affords’.83

  The English courtiers were particularly proud of the fact that on this occasion they were better informed than their German counterparts: one of the Germans asked if the ‘peace’ being feted was the conclusion of a minor war that had been taking place in the Baltic.84

  That night the festival mood rippled out from Leicester House: ‘all the town’ was ‘feignedly or unfeignedly, transported’.85 Down in Dorset, the gentleman who led the local militia lined up his men and began making toasts to each member of the royal family, commanding his troop to fire ‘a volley of shot’ after each one. An appalled neighbour described how they got through a bowl of punch, a barrel of ale and an unspecified quantity of wine before throwing their glasses over their heads. The next morning, the generous gentleman was observed to be ‘a little disordered with that night’s work’.86

  It was on that next day, a Sunday, that the reconciliation between George I and his daughter-in-law did finally take place. The location was St James’s Palace, and Princess Caroline was allowed to visit her daughters. King and princess ‘went into a little closet’ to talk, and remained there for more than an hour. The king’s Turk, Mohammed, had to entertain Caroline’s waiting servants with a horrible story of a suspected death by poison.87

  All the actors were now ready for the reconciliation to be performed in public, before the world. Hence the spectacular drawing-room party planned for the next night, Monday 25 April.

  Yet they all knew that it was more a matter of form than substance.88 Mary Cowper acknowledged that the royal family were mere pawns in the hands of the politicians: ‘I verily believe Townshend and Walpole have agreed for themselves only,’ while ‘the Prince and Princess get nothing in reality by this agreement, but leave to come sometimes to Court; and for that they give up their children, suffer their friends to betray and quit them’.89

  The king, too, was displeased with the terms agreed, berating Walpole for failing to bring his son fully under control. News of this came to the prince’s camp ‘by very good hands’ of a trusted intermediary, ‘Mohammed the Turk’.90 And despite his marvellous powers of persuasion, Walpole had failed to arrange for the return of the prince’s children. Behind the scenes, Princess Caroline wept bitterly.

  ‘Mr Walpole,’ she snarled, ‘this will be no jesting matter for me; you will hear of me and my complaints every day and hour, in every place, if I have not my children again.’91

  *

  So, as Princess Caroline, Prince George Augustus and their court lined up in the king’s drawing room on the evening of 25 April 1720, they were all angry. Caroline’s powerful grievance made it nearly impossible for her to force her famous smile. This was the fate of princesses. As her predecessor Mary II had said, ‘I must grin when my heart is ready to break, and talk when my heart is so oppress’d I can scarce breathe.’92

  The crowded drawing room at St James’s Palace, with ladies tottering under the weight of their highly patterned metallic mantuas

  Luckily Princess Caroline was surrounded on all sides by her ladies, and she relied even more than usual upon their physical and moral support. They were more than equal to the task. Jobs serving the princess, in what was normally such ‘a very gay court’, were in high demand and short supply.93 The most senior were the Ladies of her Bedchamber, whose salaries were a generous £500 a year.94 They included the diarist Mary Cowper, who brilliantly skewered many a drawing-room skirmish upon the nib of her pen, and the Countess of Bristol, who was unfortunately addicted to gambling. (She was miraculously transformed whenever she managed to get up from the card table: ‘being resolv’d to make up for time misspent, she has 2 lovers at a time’.95)

  Their duties, though, had recently become more ceremonial than practical, and the actual work was now done by the next rank down, the six Women of the Bedc
hamber (on salaries of £300 a year). They included Charlotte Clayton, a staunch friend to everyone who thought the church too wealthy and powerful, and the emotional and imaginative Charlotte Amelia Titchborne.

  ‘Mrs Clayton’ and ‘Mrs Titchborne’ were really at the heart of Princess Caroline’s supportive inner set. Because the Ladies of the Bedchamber had become too grand to do real work, they spent less time with the princess. As a result, the Women of the Bedchamber, while technically inferior, began to wield the greater influence. Everyone knew that their shared apartment was ‘the fashionable evening rendezvous of the most distinguished wits and beauties’, and Charlotte Clayton was bombarded with letters from petitioners seeking her ‘clever way’ of putting suggestions to Princess Caroline at a well-chosen moment.96

  Henrietta Howard had a place in this charmed circle. Even Caroline could see that Henrietta took no pleasure in her role as Prince George Augustus’s mistress and that she was also a hard-working, valuable and sympathetic servant. The princess probably felt more than a little sorry for her rival.

  They had met seven years ago, when Henrietta had scraped together the last of her money and fled to Hanover in order to escape her husband’s creditors. Like many others, she’d hoped to become intimate with Hanover’s ruling family in the expectation that they would one day inherit the English throne.

  The gamble had paid off. In Hanover, Henrietta did indeed meet and suit Princess Caroline, who offered her a job. Soon afterwards, Prince George Augustus indicated that he too would like a share of her services. Although she never discussed it, Caroline seemed on the surface to accept Henrietta’s additional role as royal mistress. She rightly feared that a woman less sensible than Henrietta would be more likely to cause trouble.