Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  After the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Henrietta Howard – both servant and mistress – accompanied the new royal family on its journey to England. She was retained as part of Princess Caroline’s British household, earning £300 a year as one of the six Bedchamber Women, and her husband was made a Groom of the Bedchamber to George I. The couple initially shared an apartment at St James’s Palace, but their attachment to different households would prove problematic when war broke out between the rival courts.15 During these years, Henrietta found herself becoming friends with the sprightly literary spirits of the age: John Gay, Alexander Pope, Dr Arbuthnot and Jonathan Swift.

  By then, Henrietta’s husband had become a terrible burden to her. He took her money, and she was often in physical danger from his alcohol-fuelled violence. After she’d left him, Henrietta addressed to Charles Howard a list of the abuses she’d endured at his hands: ‘you have call’d me names and have threatened to kick me and to break my neck. I have often laid abed with you when I have been under apprehensions of your doing me a mischief and sometimes I have got out of bed for fear you shou’d.’16

  While everybody else seemed to tolerate her role as the Prince of Wales’s mistress, her husband sought to benefit from it, pretending to be jealous and demanding to be compensated financially for his supposed shame.

  Henrietta’s plight was pitiable. While her husband lorded it over her ‘with tyranny; with cruelty, [her] life in danger’, she had no remedy in the eyes of the law. Society treated women abominably, Henrietta thought privately. ‘If they have superior sense, superior fortitude and reason, then why a slave to what’s inferior to them?’ she asked. Her own husband was indeed ‘inferior to all mankind’, and Henrietta reasoned with herself that his neglect, alternating with brutality, negated their marriage contract: ‘I must believe I am free.’17

  Yet she recognised that the world would not agree. Only the exceptional voices of her time, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s, publicly exposed the unfairness of an unfaithful wife being universally condemned while a husband’s adultery was overlooked:

  For wives ill us’d no remedy remains,

  To daily racks condemn’d, and to eternal chains.18

  Henrietta’s only comfort lay in her female friends and, when they were absent, their letters. Lady Lansdowne was typical in writing: ‘Dear Mrs Howard, you & I shall live to see better days, & love & honour to flourish once more.’19

  *

  Despite the difficulties she had with her husband, Henrietta was remarkably well-suited to the job of royal mistress. She was never arrogant or indiscreet. Polite to everybody, she became known as ‘The Swiss’ because of her neutrality in court storms. If Henrietta were a book, wrote her friend Molly Hervey, she would be ‘a complete treatise on subjects moral, instructive, and entertaining, perfectly well digested & connected, the style is admirable, the reasoning clear & strong’.20

  There were a few people at court who disliked Henrietta, but they condemned her in the mildest of terms. ‘The real truth is, that Mrs Howard was more remarkable for beauty than for understanding,’ concluded an early biographer of Sir Robert Walpole, and he said that her becoming royal mistress was just a matter of convenience.

  Henrietta was not even the first choice, he claimed, as Prince George Augustus had previously been ‘enamoured’ of the spirited Mary Bellenden. She’d boldly turned him down and allowed her friend Henrietta to pick him up instead.21

  And Henrietta did not find the mistress’s role at all delightful, even in the tender years of her relationship with Prince George Augustus before he became king. ‘I was told’, wrote Mary Bellenden to Henrietta as early as April 1722, ‘that somebody that shall be nameless, was grown sour & cross & not so good to you as usual.’22 There was certainly a greater frankness and affection between Henrietta and Mary than between either of them and their so-called lover.

  The goings-on at George II’s court are often described in almost cosy terms, as if the king could legitimately sleep with any number of jolly playfellows, and certainly there were plenty of women willing to taste ‘the charms/ of love and life in a young monarch’s arms’.23 This was tolerated partly because George II made sure that his mistresses were perceived to be powerless – a sharp contrast to the despicable potent German wiles wielded by Melusine in the previous generation. ‘He had seen, and lamented, that his father had been governed by his mistresses,’ people said, and was therefore ‘extremely cautious to avoid a similar error’.24

  Caroline likewise treated ‘those little episodes’ of her husband’s with indifference for the most part, and with some contempt. She knew that in reality George II ‘reserved his heart, and his friendship’ for her alone.25 Sir Robert Walpole also claimed to perceive the real situation behind the royal marriage. In an arresting image, he said that those who cultivated Henrietta at the expense of the queen had the ‘wrong sow by the ear’.26

  Through the pens of her friends, Henrietta is shown to be a thoughtful, witty, warm and reasonable woman, far too intelligent to be satisfied as a member of the royal circus, where handing glasses at table and doing up dresses formed her chief duties. Mary Bellenden, who had resigned as a Maid of Honour upon a marriage made for love, wrote to her friend that ‘it wou’d make one half mad’ to think of the time they had both misspent in servitude.

  ‘I am happy’, she continued, ‘& I wou’d to God you were so. I wish … that you might leave that life of hurry, & be able to enjoy those that love you, & be a little at rest.’27

  *

  By 1734, after nearly two decades as the king’s mistress, Henrietta herself was almost desperate to retire. George II and Caroline had been king and queen for nearly seven years, and this had been the busiest, most exciting and most successful period of their lives so far.

  In the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, there was a rumour that George II was planning to rescue his much-maligned mother’s reputation, bringing her portrait out of storage and hanging it on the wall.28 But another undercurrent of gossip rivalled it: that now, as king, with full access to the archives at Hanover, he’d discovered some of the letters written by his mother to her lover. These had shocked him, convinced him of her guilt and killed the affection in his memory of her.29 The new king remained touchy on the subject and sought to destroy his mother’s papers. In 1732, he used the diplomatic service to suppress an anonymous and scurrilous work about her called the Histoire secrète de la duchesse d’Hanover.30

  The king discussed almost – but not quite – everything with John Hervey, now Vice-Chamberlain of the court. While he would freely dissect his difficult relationship with his father, he never mentioned his mother at all.31 Only one thing is sure: the death of the disgraced mother he had not seen for so long, followed so soon by the demise of his hated father, must have caused a strange mixture of reactions. ‘I am at a loss’, he admitted, ‘how to express myself upon this great and melancholy occasion.’32

  George II was at first almost overwhelmed by his new responsibilities as king. A popular anecdote has it that the announcement of his father’s death literally caught him napping and only half-dressed, ‘with his breeches in his hand’ and reluctant to give a hearing to the messenger who brought the news.33 His first Parliament was similarly farcical, as one person present noted: ‘I saw him make [his opening speech] today, I can’t say heard, for his majesty was in so much confusion he could not put out his voice to be heard.’ Likewise, with ‘his crown he seemed a little awkward being ye first time of wearing it’.34

  But George II’s reign got off to a much more secure start than his father’s. Even the Jacobites admitted that the new king, although ‘passionate, proud and peevish’, made a reasonably good first impression. His declared intention of ‘turning off the Germans’, for example, went down very well.35 At his coronation, Handel’s superlative musical setting for the ancient coronation text Zadok the Priest surged through Westminster Abbey for the first time; in following centuries it would become i
nextricably associated with the ceremony of crowning. ‘I shall never forget the joy that swell’d my heart,’ wrote one witness present.36

  Another of the memorable sights seen by the coronation’s hordes of spectators was the Countess of Orkney, the retired mistress of William III, exposing ‘behind a mixture of fat and wrinkles, and before a considerable pair of boobies a good deal withered’, along with ‘a great belly’.37

  Henrietta was there too, in Queen Caroline’s train, making one of the ‘finest figures of all the procession’ in her scarlet and silver gown.38

  *

  The coronation feast took place in Westminster Hall, where William Kent had designed a festive triumphal arch. It was topped by statues of the new king and queen looking down upon the immense banquet spread below.

  Kent would enjoy magnificent patronage from Britain’s new rulers. Over time he became almost constantly ‘called on for draughts’ or designs, both at court and ‘amongst people of quality’. In 1728, George II made Kent his official history painter and ‘keeper or preserver of the paintings of the royal palaces for life’.39

  George II and Caroline enjoyed joining Kent ‘upon the scaffold’ to see him at work in this new capacity. Once they even climbed up to the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall to inspect his ongoing restoration of its paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. Kent’s own record of the occasion shows the contrasting gruffness of the king and the queen’s elegant eloquence: ‘his Majesty was pleas’d to tell me I had done them exceeding well’, while ‘the Queen told me I not only deserv’d thanks from the King’, but from ‘all lovers of painting’.40

  Kent’s success continued to infuriate Sir James Thornhill. The older artist had long ago paid for his presumption in setting himself up as an architect and for his insolence towards the Board of the Office of the King’s Works. In the matter of the decoration of Kensington Palace he had managed to blend all parties ‘against him in all his affairs’. As a consequence he had fallen so far from fashion, and so suddenly, that he had ‘long been unemployed’ by 1734.41 It would be the year in which he died.

  With his customary versatility, Kent also designed much-praised costumes for court masquerades:Tudor huntsmen in green, for example, with bows and arrows and ‘caps and feathers upon their heads’.42 In 1733, working as an architect, he’d completed a splendid new ‘Royal Mews’ for the king’s horses at Charing Cross. But the most important of his works were by now taking shape out in the garden, a new field of endeavour for him and one in which he would become the country’s undisputed master.

  His most striking works so far had been a clutch of crazy and inventive grottoes, summerhouses and other structures for Caroline, to ornament the grounds of her summer residence at Richmond. Kent’s love was for ‘natural’ landscapes, a far cry from the rigid alleys and clipped hedges of the previous generation’s baroque gardens. His friends cast scorn upon those old ‘damned dull walks’, those ‘cold and insipid straight walks which would make the Signior sick’.43 In the same spirit, Caroline had the great formal baroque garden planted by Queen Anne at Kensington Palace uprooted and replaced with a rolling lawn.

  ‘The Signior’ much preferred planning gardens to palace politics. A spoof letter from one of his clients describes the simple pleasure to be found in masterminding the woodlands of a Norfolk estate, contrasting his and Kent’s joint enjoyment with the machinations of the court:

  Here Kent and I are planting clumps

  Not minding whom our monarch rumps

  Or what Sir Robert’s doing.44

  Sir Robert Walpole was by now well ensconced in power, and cordially hated by those who resented his iron grip over people and events. Now enormously fat, he was unkindly but memorably described as ‘the potent knight whose belly goes/At least a yard before his nose’.45

  He was the leader of the Whig party, but this was still far from being a disciplined organisation with a defined membership. It was a relaxed coalition of politicians, generally opposed by the Tories with their more rural and conservative interests. Yet the Whigs clearly remained in the ascendant. The control they had over the disposal of offices allowed them to shower their loyal supporters with rich rewards. In the sometimes rather grubby elections of the early Georgian period, they had little difficulty in keeping the Tories out.

  Disaffected Whigs harried and spat at their colleagues, though, while renegade Tories occasionally accepted Walpole’s blandished offices, and parliamentary politics were lively and passionate. Peter Wentworth was left stunned by Walpole’s eloquence in the House of Commons: ‘shou’d I attempt to repeat after him I shou’d spoil the jokes … I am angry at my unhappy memory that cannot retain them.’46

  Sometimes those jealous of Henrietta’s position as official mistress attempted to wound her by accusing her of consorting with Tory politicians. Yet she cleverly parried these attacks, carefully cultivating an image of herself as delightful but dim, and entirely without influence. Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henrietta accepted that a woman should ‘conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness’.47

  Many of Henrietta’s colleagues were openly confused by her mixture of sociability and apparent insignificance. ‘She possessed every accomplishment and good quality which were ever the lot of a woman,’ ponders one perplexed eighteenth-century historian, while at the same time recounting anecdotes that show Henrietta demonstrating her helplessness.48 She sometimes ostentatiously asked people ‘to procure a trifling’ favour for her at court, asking them to keep her name out of the matter and saying, ‘if it is known that I have applied, I have no chance of succeeding’.49

  In fact, this pretence of powerlessness was a crafty strategy to maintain a low profile and stay safe.

  *

  Immediately after the coronation in 1727, it was found to be impossible that ‘the Palace of St James’s should be ready soon enough’ for occupation.50 So king, queen and all their households went off to Kensington Palace instead. Henrietta arrived at what would now become her regular summer home.

  George II and Caroline wasted no time in altering the arrangements for the education of their daughters at Kensington: their cruel governess Lady Portland was sacked, and was reported to be sadly ‘fallen away since her dismissal from Court’. Lady Deloraine, the former Maid of Honour Mary Howard, came back into the royal household as her replacement.51

  Although George II and Caroline were now reunited with their elder daughters, family harmony was still strangely absent. It seems that the king thought the regained children had been somehow tainted by their time with his father; certainly he and they were no longer close.

  For the next decade of George II’s reign – the 1730s – we have the flamboyant, gripping and voluminous account of his and Caroline’s lives as king and queen captured in the memoirs of John Hervey.

  The most malicious, amusing and memorable spokesperson for the Georgian court, Hervey had a voice that was – and remains – simply unmistakable. He also looked increasingly odd. His golden, girlish good looks that had initially attracted Molly Lepell had decayed, and he was now a foppish, ill-ish man with bad teeth and sometimes a little too much make-up. ‘This world consists of men, women and Herveys,’Lady Mary Wortley Montagu famously said.52

  Hervey’s pen portrait of Caroline, his royal mistress and much-loved friend, has given her stellar status among the British queens. As a result of Hervey’s readability and wit, her reputation remains sky-high: a clever, loquacious woman, trapped by a trying husband and a frustrating job.

  But John Hervey, her strongest advocate, can also be a treacherous guide to the court. His partiality for Caroline led him to caricature George II as an ignorant and insensitive boor in a crude, one-sided portrait which has dominated popular history.

  John Hervey joked about his own cold and feline personality. He said his coat of arms should really be ‘a cat scratchant, with this motto: “For my friends where they itch; for my enemie
s where they are sore”’

  To be fair, Hervey’s stated aim in writing his memoirs of the court was much more modest than that of being its official historian. It was merely to capture a scene, to titillate a little and to amuse. ‘I am determined to report everything just as it is, or at least just as it appears to me,’ he wrote, ‘and those who have a curiosity to see courts and courtiers dissected must bear with the dirt they find.’53

  Although John Hervey is a brilliant sketch-writer, a cold and razor-sharp wit and an exaggerator of the ridiculous, the theatrical and the gothic aspects of the court, that doesn’t mean that we can’t believe him at all. At the heart of each of his brilliant word-pictures, with all their superfluous frills of absurdity, there probably lies a germ of truth. The events he describes really happened; the words were really spoken – though perhaps not in such a high-camp manner as he suggests.54

  And Hervey was doubtless very close to the king and queen, and privy to their secrets. The summer of 1734 saw him:

  in greater favour with the Queen, and consequently with the King, than ever; they told him everything, and talked of everything before him. The Queen sent for him every morning as soon as the King went from her, and kept him, while she breakfasted … generally an hour and a half at least.

  Caroline called Hervey her ‘child, her pupil, and her charge’. She also used to tell him that she permitted ‘his being so impertinent and daring to contradict her so continually’ only because ‘she could not live without him’. ‘It is well I am so old,’ she often said, ‘or I should be talked about for this creature.’