Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  *

  The battle of the painters had begun long before Kent’s return from Italy. The opening salvo had been fired not by the king, but by Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline, with the help of their chosen artist, Sir James Thornhill.9

  In 1716, Caroline had redecorated her apartment at Hampton Court Palace. Like Kensington, Hampton Court was another of the summer residences to which the Hanoverian royal family had become entitled in 1714. (Caroline, with her German accent, pronounced it ‘Hamthancour’.10) When the king went off to Hanover for the summer, Princess Caroline and Prince George Augustus took advantage of his absence to host a series of sparkling parties at the palace. Caroline’s suite there provided a particularly magnificent setting, for it had been decorated by Britain’s greatest baroque painter, Sir James Thornhill.

  Thornhill was becoming the definitive artist of the early eighteenth-century. His work on Princess Caroline’s apartment at Hampton Court was preceded by the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, and would be followed by the decoration of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He’d faced stiff competition for the job at Hampton Court from Italian painters such as Sebastiano Ricci, and indeed continental artists had been snapping up most of the best recent commissions in England. Thornhill himself had studied under the partially sighted Italian Antonio Verrio. When he’d worked at Hampton Court previously, for Queen Anne, it had been as Verrio’s assistant.

  His compatriots were proud when Thornhill won the commission for Princess Caroline’s bedchamber. Lord Halifax, first Lord of the Treasury, gushed generously that ‘Mr Thornhill our countryman has strove against all oppositions & difficulties & now has got near the very top of the mountain’.11

  Thornhill now demonstrated that the English could indeed do ‘history painting’ – showing mythical events on a dramatically grand scale – just as well as the Italians. On his ceiling for Princess Caroline, a Babylonian princess attempts to stop Apollo from driving his golden sun-chariot out of the sea so as not to disturb the sleepers (or lovers) below. Round the edge Thornhill placed portraits of Princess Caroline and Prince George Augustus themselves. When the couple lay together in Caroline’s brand-new crimson damask bed, they could look up and admire their own faces.

  James Thornhill had undoubtedly climbed to the summit of his profession, but he’d always been a bit too pleased with himself to be a truly likeable character. He was a man fond of his own dignity, jowly and fleshy, with beetling eyebrows. In a self-portrait, he’s being slowly strangled by his own tight cravat as he glances rather glumly from his canvas. When he was honoured with a knighthood in 1720, he bought back his family’s lost ancestral estate of Thornhill in Dorset. There he painted another self-portrait upon his drawing-room ceiling so that he, too, could easily gaze with satisfaction at his own smug countenance.12

  Thornhill’s work for Princess Caroline was much admired. When it was complete, she and her husband held a memorable season for the junior court in this romantic palace down by the river. Everybody had fun at their amusing crowded balls and masquerades, so much so that ‘some virgins conceived’.13 Meanwhile, George I’s lacklustre court was constantly criticised in the newspapers, and his mistress and half-sister written off as ‘whores, nay, what is more vexatious, ugly old whores!’14

  The king had much to achieve before his own court could outclass his son’s in splendour and popularity.

  *

  In June 1716, while Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline were living the high life at Hampton Court, a survey revealed the desperately poor condition of Kensington Palace. The king’s summer residence there was veering towards the dangerous.

  The rural royal retreat at Kensington was an old-fashioned mansion created in the 1690s by the Dutch King William III and his English wife Mary II. Kensington’s great advantage lay in its air. Clean and dry by comparison with the damp old palace of St James’s, it was said to ‘cure without medicines’.15 Its healthy properties had driven the asthmatic King William III to select Kensington as one of his principal homes. There:

  while the Town in damps and darkness lies,

  They breathe in sun-shine and see azure skies.16

  So the wheezing William and his wife had purchased an old seventeenth-century villa there, and set their architect, Sir Christopher Wren, to work upon expanding it. He added a pavilion to each of its four corners and created a pair of new long galleries for king and queen respectively.

  These alterations became Mary’s pet project, and she drove work forward with such passion and speed that an imperfect mortar mix was overlooked and a workman killed. William and Mary’s court followed their king and queen to this newly fashionable suburb, and within fifteen years Kensington village had grown to three times the size of Chelsea and was ‘fill’d with persons of honour and distinction’.17

  It was only six years after becoming queen, though, that Mary received the equivalent of a death sentence. Waking up at Kensington Palace on the morning of 21 December 1694, she discovered upon her arm the red rash preceding smallpox. The young queen, only thirty-two and radiantly beautiful, was ‘suddenly become a frightful spectacle’, and the country was devastated when the ‘putrid smallpox’ claimed her life at Kensington a week later.18

  The palace she left behind was pleasant enough and beautifully situated among parks and gardens. But it had been built too quickly, and the poor quality of the workmanship meant it was already half falling down. By the time of George I’s accession, it had been for some years ‘much crack’t and out of repair’.19

  Yet at first George I seemed quite satisfied with his inheritance. Before the outbreak of the ‘christening quarrel’, he’d done his best to minimise his public appearances. ‘The King locks himself up’, the courtiers complained, ‘and is never seen.’20 It was only when the quarrel erupted in 1717 that it became necessary for him to wage a war of hospitality in order to win back the supporters who were slipping away to the prince’s court.

  The unfortunate death of his grandson at Kensington in 1718 was quickly followed by one of the busiest royal social seasons ever seen. A gentleman visiting from Virginia found ‘a great crowd’ at Kensington Palace dancing in the gardens, with fireworks to celebrate the king’s birthday in May.21 That summer, the king entertained fifty or sixty guests to dinner every night and held a ball twice a week.22

  Also in 1718, at the very height of the quarrel, George I embarked upon a grand plan to rebuild and redecorate the state apartments at Kensington. He intended to breathe new life into both his palace and his court.

  All the craftsmen of London fervently hoped to become involved in this bold scheme to turn the crumbling Stuart house at Kensington into a magnificent and modern ‘Roman’ palace. To work in a royal palace would be the best commission of all.

  *

  Repairs and improvements to the royal palaces were the responsibility of the Office of the King’s Works. This department received its income from the Treasury and spent it on all manner of building and decorating projects. But inevitably the factions and spats of the drawing room affected its decision-making.

  The activities of the Office of the King’s Works were overseen by a board of five: the Surveyor-General, the Comptroller, the Master Mason, the Master Carpenter and one other. They met for weekly progress checks in their office at Scotland Yard, Westminster, crowded with ‘closets, presses &c for repositing the books, drawings & designs belonging to the several palaces’.23 Each month they received a report upon the man-hours and materials expended, and every year they enjoyed a celebratory dinner together. So far, so good, but politics complicated all their doings.

  The board’s decisions were recorded in minute detail in its heavy, leathery and voluminous volumes of minutes and warrants, all dutifully kept up to date by its clerks. These books – some of them works of calligraphic art – stolidly track the protracted negotiations that preceded work on site. Everything moved very slowly through an undergrowth of respectful ver
biage. ‘His Majesty has commanded me to signify his pleasure to your Lordships, that you give orders for the following alterations to be made in the Duchess of Kendal’s lodgings at St James’s,’ runs a typical letter.24 This is a stately machine, slowly masticating upon its duty.

  Sometimes, though, the machinery breaks down. Just occasionally, a desperate flash of jealousy emerges from behind the ponderous prose and the sparks ignited by a power struggle still glimmer on the page.

  On 19 June 1718, the king gave his ‘orders for erecting a new building at Kensington’.25 The accompanying plan showed the proposed reconstruction of the palace’s chief chambers: the Privy Chamber, Cupola and Drawing Rooms. These were the three main spaces through which visitors invited to the court’s evening ‘drawing room’ would pass. Soon the demolition of the seventeenth-century structure at the heart of the palace began, and the guts of the building were ripped out.26

  *

  In 1719, there was change at the Office of the King’s Works: Sir Thomas Hewett was appointed as the new Surveyor-General. He was an odd, cantankerous fellow, but had the qualifications of being a good strong Whig and of having toured the continent to learn about foreign architecture. (From this trip he was said to have brought back ‘a wife, atheism and many eccentricities’.27) He had dreams of building a great royal palace during his tenure as Surveyor.

  Hewett now found himself placed under considerable pressure because the king wanted the alterations at Kensington Palace to be completed ‘with all speed’.28 Despite the demolition work continuing throughout 1719, the palace remained packed with a horde of locust-like guests taking full advantage of the king’s music and free drinks. That summer was extraordinarily hot, with the result that London experienced a plague of ‘damnable bedbugs’.29

  The next year, 1720, London was convulsed by the South Sea Bubble, a frenzy of speculation in a company intending to trade with the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Fortunes were made in weeks, but the bursting of the Bubble was inevitable. Among those affected in the royal households was Peter Wentworth, the lowly equerry, whose permanent financial plight was made even more pitiful by unwise speculation.30

  At the end of July 1720, just after the South Sea stock reached its peak price, the courtiers began their first proper summer in the rebuilt Kensington Palace now emerging from its chrysalis of scaffolding. The three little princesses, George I’s granddaughters, came into residence, and an excited inhabitant of Kensington village wrote in August that ‘the Court is now in our neighbourhood; they say the King is extremely well pleased with his apartment’.31

  The main rooms rebuilt in the 1720s were the Privy, Cupola and Drawing Rooms, with William Kent’s King’s Grand Staircase providing a prologue

  In 1721, a year in which smallpox went forth in London ‘like a destroying angel’, the shell of the new rooms was finally completed.32 There was an immense new Drawing Room overlooking the gardens to the east, and an even more splendid reception room called the ‘Cupola’ or ‘Cube Room’ in the centre of the palace. Providing a fitting prologue to the whole was a vastly improved King’s Grand Staircase leading up from the courtyard. The great carver Grinling Gibbons performed some of his last work here before his death in 1721, and Sir James Thornhill’s men were employed to paint the woodwork.

  Early in 1722, quotations were sought for the decorating of the state apartments, beginning with the Cupola Room. This was to be a summer of strife as well as miserable weather: there was a Jacobite plot for a rebellion, and the king’s enemies spread rumours that ‘a cargo of new German ladies of the largest size are coming, and Mohammed … is to be chief over them’.33 Although his quarrel with his son had by now been patched up, George I still needed a freshly decorated palace to unite his court and silence his critics.

  Sir Thomas Hewett’s fancy was that the magnificent Cupola Room should be painted deceptively to look like an ancient bath of marble. As expected, Sir James Thornhill was asked to turn the idea into reality.

  But Thornhill was about to suffer a ‘mighty mortification’.34

  *

  The job had begun well for Thornhill. He’d sketched a range of proposals; the king had selected his favourite, and then ordered his Vice-Chamberlain to negotiate ‘for the price’.35 Everybody was happy; everything seemed agreed – but for the matter of the money.

  Now Thornhill made his fatal mistake. His recent successes encouraged him to demand an outrageously high figure – £800 – for decorating the room. The court’s Vice-Chamberlain, Thomas Coke, thought it simply ‘too extravagant’. So, ‘without more ado’, he invited ‘Mr Kent to Kensington & ask’d him what he would have for the same painting to be done’.36

  William Kent, little known, low paid, ten years younger than Thornhill, had risen fast from provincial obscurity and had picked up many friends along the way. Born at Bridlington in Yorkshire, he had changed his name to ‘Kent’ from the less auspicious ‘Cant’ used by his father. Kent had begun an apprenticeship with a coach painter, but by the age of twenty he’d abandoned his master ‘without leave’ and run away to London.37 He was soon attracting the kind of rich patrons who might pay for him to travel to Italy. It was a Lincolnshire gentleman, Burrell Massingberd, who eventually subsidised Kent’s studies in Rome.

  Massingberd often complained of his protégé’s failure to correspond, but the dyslexic Kent suggested that he ‘had as leave make a drawing as write a letter’.38 Indeed, he took remarkably poor care of his patrons, rightly assuming that any he lost would soon be replaced by newer, richer, grander ones.

  Back in London, Kent’s uncanny knack of possessing the right contacts proved at least as important as his vigorous but rather crude talent as a painter in winning the job at Kensington Palace. To Sir Thomas Hewett, at least, he was an old friend from Italy. Hewett had actually visited Kent in his studio in Rome in 1717; the penny-pinching Vice-Chamberlain Thomas Coke also had contacts among ‘Mr Kent’s friends’ in Italy.39

  And Hewett was not at all reluctant to follow Coke’s suggestion to drop Thornhill, because he had reasons of his own for being annoyed with Sir James.

  *

  As well as being the story of the decoration of a ceiling, this episode was something of a skirmish in a wider artistic struggle. Thornhill’s brutal ejection was part of a pattern. The old guard, who still worked in the conservative, late-seventeenth-century style, were reluctantly giving way to a new wave of designers being championed by Lord Burlington.

  Kent himself said he hated the ‘dam’d gusto’ that had dominated the last sixty years of British art.40 The new ‘gusto’, or style, on the point of breaking through was Palladianism, named after the sixteenth-century Italian designer Andrea Palladio. It had long been favoured by the Electors of Hanover and their court, where even George I’s servant Mohammed had been among the subscribers to a new edition of Palladio’s work.41

  Now poised to transform English architecture, Palladianism seemed to provide the right look for the modern, Hanoverian Britain. In contrast to the melodramatic art of the previous Stuart age, Palladianism depended upon a careful, controlled use of proportion to create its harmonious effect. While the enthusiasts for Palladio all wanted change, though, they couldn’t agree upon exactly what it should look like. Burlington, Hewett and Kent had courtiers slightly different ideas, but they could concur that Thornhill’s day was over.

  Kent made his own quotation for decorating the Cupola Room ceiling in February 1722. The painting was to be done with the greatest of diligence, he promised, following the previously approved design and for the price of only £300.42 Cleverly, Kent offered a slightly classier alternative: for an extra £50, he would use expensive ultramarine pigment instead of the cheaper Prussian blue. This proved a cunning ruse to prevent the king from looking cheap, and the ultramarine proposal for £350 was accepted.

  However, the officials of the Office of the King’s Works agreed to take particular care to check that Kent’s painting was properly executed before h
e was paid. They felt that they were taking a risk in using this untried young artist.

  *

  In 1722, then, William Kent had quickly and easily ascended to the ‘top of the mountain’. His previous acquaintance with Hewett weighed in his favour, and so did the powerful influence of his patron Lord Burlington, who promoted Kent ‘on all occasions to everything in his power, to the King, to the Court Works, & Courtiers’.43 But perhaps most vital of all to Kent’s success was the fact that Thornhill’s overconfidence had incensed a lot of important people.44

  Sir James Thornhill had recently begun to think that his talents equipped him for a bigger role than that of a mere painter. He was heard to declare that ‘he would practice as an architect’, and not unreasonably so, as he ‘certainly had skill and knowledge enough in that branch’. Yet there was an instant uproar at his presumption. ‘What a clamour’ rose up from the existing architects of London, ‘what outcries of Invasion!’45

  Thornhill made a grave tactical mistake in promoting himself as an architectural expert. What was worse, he’d been heard upbraiding the Office of the King’s Works for their supposed ‘ignorances’ in the art of building, giving the impression that he ‘would set himself up against them’. Hewett found this kind of hubris understandably offensive, so he and his board had ‘played [Thornhill] this trick’ over the Cupola Room commission.

  The mighty man did manage to swallow enough of his pride to make one last attempt at winning back the job at Kensington. He returned to Vice-Chamberlain Coke with a new, lower quotation, writing a sad little letter saying that he ‘would do it, for what any other would do it’. But it was too late. Kent was chosen, and Thornhill was categorically ‘rejected’.46

  Yet Thornhill did not lack friends and supporters of his own, including William Hogarth and the architect James Gibbs, vigorous opponents of Lord Burlington’s Palladianising vision. This gang weren’t willing to give up gracefully. William Kent may have been the surprise winner of the battle for the Cupola Room commission, but his enemies would now do their best to bring him down again.