Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  Was this flighty butterfly of the court emotionally engaged by Caroline in return, or was he simply unable to resist fluttering near to the flame of power?

  However unlikely it seemed in the wicked world of the court, the truth lay in the former. Hervey ‘really loved and admired’ the queen. He gave up all of his ‘time to her disposal’, at the cost of neglecting his beautiful wife.55

  We left Molly pursuing intrigues of her own, but she had dutifully produced a whole string of Hervey heirs. Named for the king, her own George was born in 1721, followed by Augustus. Molly also had two daughters, Lepell and Mary. Frederick, her third son, born in 1730, was a puny infant, and his grandfather thought his weak physique had been caused by the pregnant Molly’s irresponsible fondness for ‘dancing, morning suppers, sharp wines, china oranges,&c’.56 Three more children would follow, making a total of eight. Yet Molly was distinctly unmaternal: ‘I mortally hate children and am uneasy when they are in the room.’57

  John Hervey was likewise uninterested in his children, and his passion for politics also separated him from Molly. Sir Robert Walpole, Hervey’s great friend and ally, ‘had formerly made love to her, but unsuccessfully … Sir Robert Walpole, therefore, detested Lady Hervey, and Lady Hervey him.’58 In writing about this incident, John Hervey, a man of his time, seems to have valued the political bond that he shared with Walpole more highly than the relationship he’d once had with his wife.

  As Caroline’s strongest supporter, Hervey always made a point of running down Henrietta. Although Caroline ‘affected to approve’ of her husband’s ‘amours’, she was in fact rather jealous of whatever vestige of influence Henrietta may have had.

  So she made quite sure that the door to Henrietta’s apartment ‘should not lead to power and favour’, and that the hopeful sycophants who traipsed through it should leave disappointed.59 John Gay, for one, found that his friendship with Henrietta was worthless, and ‘the queen’s jealousy’ prevented his ever being offered an important job at court.60 Lord Chesterfield, too, fell from favour for the same reason: he was detected paying a night-time visit to Henrietta, ostensibly to deposit with her for safe-keeping a large sum of money won by gambling. Caroline discovered his perfidy, and Chesterfield paid the price of her displeasure.61

  While Henrietta shrank away from political intrigue, Caroline clearly relished it. She and Sir Robert Walpole had a system of secret code words to use when the king was present, so that they could together change tack in conversation in a manner ‘imperceptible by the bystanders’.62 George II was blithely unsuspicious of the fact that he was being manipulated, and would sometimes ‘cry out, with colour flushing into his cheeks’ that Sir Robert was ‘a brave fellow’ who had ‘more spirit than any man [he] ever knew’.63

  As the satirists had it, Caroline was all-powerful:

  You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain;

  We know ’tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign …

  Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

  Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.64

  Yet the cunning Walpole boasted that he, not she, ultimately pulled the strings of this puppet king:

  Should I tell either the King or the Queen what I propose to bring them to six months hence, I could never succeed. Step by step I can carry them … but if I ever show them at a distance to what end that road leads, they stop short, and all my designs are always defeated.65

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  A satirical print called The Festival of the Golden Rump. Queen Caroline injects magic medicine up a raving, satyr-like George II’s backside in order to bring him back under her control. Sir Robert Walpole looks on approvingly; the courtiers are shown as bizarre savages taking part in an exotic ritual

  When George II and Caroline first became king and queen, Henrietta had lived for several weeks in real fear of being kidnapped by her violent husband. Charles Howard had hoped for some time to win financial advantage for himself by threatening to demand the return of his wife. He had even obtained a warrant from the Lord Chief Justice giving him the authority to seize her by force. But Henrietta ‘feared nothing so much as falling again into his hands’, and consequently ‘did not dare to stir’ outside St James’s Palace.

  The stout Caroline proved herself on this occasion to be a doughty protector to Henrietta. When Charles Howard actually attempted to storm the queen’s apartment, in search of his wife, Caroline boldly stood her ground. Afterwards she admitted that she’d been ‘horribly afraid’, knowing him to be ‘brutal as well as a little mad, and seldom quite sober’. She thought him quite capable of throwing her out of the window.66

  Once Howard had been ejected from the palace, the whole matter was hushed up. He was given money to leave the king’s mistress alone, ‘and so this affair ended’, the king reluctantly paying £1,200 in order to retain the lover he no longer desired, and Howard receiving the bribe ‘for relinquishing what he would have been sorry to keep’.67

  ‘Marriage is traffick throughout’, claims a character in one of Henry Fielding’s contemporary dramas, expressing views shared by Charles Howard. ‘As most of us bargain to be husbands, so some of us bargain to be cuckolds.’68

  Molly Hervey understood perfectly how Henrietta’s fear of her husband compelled her to remain in her degrading relationship with the king, and commiserated with her about the long-drawn-out fading of George II’s favour: ‘the sun has not darted one beam on you a great while. You may freeze in the dog-days, for all the warmth you will find from our Sol.’69

  Indeed, Henrietta became increasingly anxious to retire from the court, despite the protection that it offered against her husband. ‘How soon it will be agreeable to you that I leave your family?’ she asked George II in one undated letter, making an attempt to retreat from royal service. ‘From your Majesty’s behaviour to me, it is impossible not to think my removal from your presence must be most agreeable to your inclinations.’70 But this storm, like many others, blew over, and Henrietta was obliged to stay.

  In 1728, she finally succeeded in persuading her husband to sign a formal deed of separation, an extreme and very rare proceeding for her age and social class.71 It was wonderful to be able to cut loose from him at last, but freedom came at a high price.

  She had no chance of winning custody of her only child, and it seemed unlikely that she would ever see her beloved son again.

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  Kensington Palace was the backdrop to the world in which Henrietta had to live but longed to leave. Her apartment there was ‘very damp and unwholesome’, situated in a semi-basement three feet underground. Insanitary and unhealthy, its floor produced ‘a constant crop of mushrooms’.72

  The south view of Kensington Palace, with courtiers gliding about the lawns

  Surprisingly, the Georgian kings verged upon the miserly in the facilities they provided for their households. George II prided himself upon at least attempting to live within his means and shunned superfluous expenditure on palaces and parties. This was partly because the nature of monarchy itself was changing. People were beginning to query the need for the extravagant baroque architecture now to be seen across Europe, and to question the authority of the absolutist kings who commissioned it. According to William Hooper, writing in 1770, ‘the glory of a British monarch consists, not in a handful of tinsel courtiers’, but in the ‘freedom, the dignity and happiness of his people’.73 Henrietta and her colleagues paid for this attitude with slightly substandard accommodation.

  Yet the palace in the park provided a snug refuge from life in London, where Henrietta would have found it hard to live in the civilised style to which she had grown accustomed. The previous year, a visitor to grimy London found it deeply disappointing, ‘many of its streets being dirty and ill-paved, its houses of brick, not very high … blacken’d with the unmerciful smoke of coal-fires’.74 Henrietta’s court salary, £300 a year, would have been just enough to afford ‘a pint of port at night, two servants, and
an old maid, a little garden … provided you live in the country’.75 Her pension, were she to leave court, would not support a London life of any pretension whatsoever.

  Visitors to Kensington Palace drove from town across Hyde Park. At intervals along the way, posts were enchantingly topped with lighted lanterns ‘every evening when the Court is at Kensington’. The enduring name of this road through the park, ‘Rotten Row’, is probably a corruption of the ‘Rue du Roi’, or ‘King’s Road’, originally built for William III but improved for the Georgian monarchs.

  The gardens surrounding Kensington Palace were now beginning to take on their final form, which remains recognisable today. A visitor in 1726 had found no fewer than fifty labourers hard at work making improvements to the palace’s immediate surroundings. 76 The royal gardener, Charles Bridgeman, had been busy ‘planting espaliers and sowing wood’ all around the building, and the vast Round Pond was dug to provide a pleasing prospect from the drawing room’s windows.77

  The glades and avenues of the ‘delightful’ and ‘glorious’ Kensington Gardens were opened to the public on Saturdays, ‘when the company appeared in full dress’.78 Here Caroline indulged her almost superhuman love of walking. She often exhausted her ladies-in-waiting (one of them ‘was ready to drop down she was so weary’ after a royal ramble), but the devoted Peter Wentworth loved a ‘good long limping walk’ with his queen.79 Sometimes he and she walked together ‘till candle-light, being entertain’d with very fine french horns’.80 It’s understandable that Caroline loved gardens, where a little more freedom of movement and conversation might be possible than indoors. As John Hervey asked, ‘is the air sweeter for a court; or the walks pleasanter for being bounded with sentinels?’81

  This was truly the heyday of the palace proper at Kensington, with its water system, transport, cleaning and cooking arrangements by now well established and finely tuned. During the reign of George I, Kensington’s state apartments had been used ‘only on publick days’ and otherwise left locked.82 In the summer of 1734, though, the whole palace was buzzing with life and activity. ‘My time at Kensington’, wrote Peter Wentworth to his brother about his new life in Caroline’s service, ‘was very precious.’83

  Wentworth also described the daily court routine: ‘up every morning by six a clock and ride out by 8 or 9 till 11; then new dress for the levées, and morning drawing room’. Then, he said, ‘we go to dinner at three and start from table a little after 5 in order to walk with the Queen’. At six, everyone returned and sat down to cards in the drawing room. Wentworth had recently been appointed to the paid position of managing the public lottery, and had begun to dare to hope again that his sober and assiduous attendance at court would result in a further promotion of some kind: ‘if I don’t make something of it at last I shall have hard fate’.84

  In 1734, Mrs Jane Keen, now well settled into the job of palace housekeeper, made a survey of all the chimneys that needed sweeping, and her list gives a good idea of how the accommodation was laid out. All in all there were 246 chimneys in the palace, requiring a sweep ‘every 14 or 21 days’ when the court was in residence and the fireplaces ‘in constant use’.85 Mrs Keen began her tour of the palace at the ‘porter’s lodge’ (one chimney), then moved on to the ‘Stone Gallery’ range, which was packed with courtiers’ lodgings, including those of John Hervey (one chimney). There too was the apartment reserved for the ‘Lord of the Bedchamber’ in waiting at any particular moment (three chimneys).

  Then Mrs Keen moved on through the state and private apartments of the king and queen. Henrietta’s large, if damp, apartment (five chimneys) was in Clock Court, and it was separated from the King’s Privy Lodgings (twenty chimneys) only by the wardrobe, a storage room for unused furniture.

  George II’s private apartments lay on the first floor, with a lovely outlook east over the gardens. Caroline, on the other hand, was lodged in a rather poky suite with no views. The ladies in ‘close waiting’ at any given time spent their night right outside Caroline’s bedchamber, upon a bedstead with a feather mattress and ‘five fine blankets’.86When the king wanted to sleep with his wife, he always came to her rooms rather than vice versa.

  The scene of the action: the king’s, the queen’s and the mistress’s apartments at Kensington Palace

  When the family was in residence and all 246 fireplaces were lit, the building was toasty warm: ‘in all ye rooms great coal fires instead of wood’.87 Fortunately the palace was by now well protected from fire, a constant concern both at Kensington and elsewhere in the wooden world of eighteenth-century London. The palace had been terribly damaged in 1692, when a blaze caused by ‘the carelessness of a candle’ destroyed part of the south-west range. On that occasion the fire engines were so slow to arrive from Whitehall that the flames were eventually extinguished by soldiers bringing up and breaking open bottles of beer from the cellars.88 By 1734, Kensington Palace had its own fire engines.89 These devices were tanks of water on wheels, and their crews pumped huge levers to create a flame-quenching jet. John Rowley, formerly master of mechanics to George I, had designed the fire engines at Kensington, Hampton Court and the House of Commons. His masterpiece was the ‘great water engine’ at Windsor Castle, which remained in working order for forty years.90

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  The accounts for the month of August 1734 show the prodigious quantity and variety of food that Henrietta and her fellow courtiers consumed. It was prepared in specialised departments round the Kitchen Court ranging from the ‘Jelly Office’ to the ‘Herb Office’, while outside on the green were the ‘Feeding Houses for Fowls’.91 Many of the employees of these various ‘offices’ lived in garrets immediately above their place of work.

  A cook, sketched by William Kent

  The chosen suppliers of goods to the kitchens would provide produce on credit at agreed rates, and everything was carefully recorded by the clerks. Volume after volume of their work remains in the National Archives today: the ‘credit accounts’ listing all the food entering the Georgian kitchens, and the ‘diet books’ registering every single dish cooked and served to the royal family. The more exotic provisions to appear include olives, gherkins and mangoes; Bologna sausages and giblet pies; and udders, trotters and pig’s heads.92

  The courtiers were entitled to various allowances of food depending upon their rank. The more senior, like Molly Hervey, had ‘three pats of Richmond butter and a quarter-pint of cream’ every day by right.93 Even the lowly sempstress, Mrs Purcell, enjoyed a daily bottle of claret.94

  Despite the emphasis placed upon meat as food fit for kings, there was no shortage of vegetables available too. In two years, for example, the royal gardens provided

  1684 salads. Above 6000 cabbage lettuces. 3541 cucumbers. 1088 artichokes. 4668 celery and endive. 1351 bundles of asparagus with radishes, peas, beans, French beans, carrots, savoys, cauliflowers, onions, sweet herbs, borecole [broccoli?] and great parcels of flowers.

  This was as well as ‘4368 baskets of fruit of all sorts’.95 Caroline was fond of fruit with sour cream in the mornings, and enjoyed ‘a fine breakfast with the addition of cherries & strawberry’.96

  Drinking was another important part of life at Henrietta’s court. Hot chocolate was taken each morning. Later in the day tea soothed many a courtier’s cares: a lover lost, a gambling debt gained. It was promoted by matrons as a cure for a broken heart: ‘now leave complaining, and begin your Tea’.97 But John Hervey’s father thought it was ‘detestable, fatal liquor’, which had brought many people ‘near to death’s door’.98

  Although tea was considered rather decadent, meals were always accompanied by something even stronger. Each day after dinner, we hear, the ‘men remain at the table; upon which, the cloth being taken off, the footmen place a bottle of wine’. The servants present the drinkers ‘with glasses well rinsed’ and they ‘always drink too much, because they sit too long at it’.99 Lord Lifford on one occasion drank so much that he fell off his chair, and the next morning Caroline
‘railed at him before all the Court upon getting drunk in her company’.100

  Peter Wentworth found that this post-prandial ritual between three and five every day placed a sore strain upon his resolution to avoid taking even a single ‘drop of wine too much’. His seventeen-year-old daughter Catherina’s sudden and tragic death from consumption, the ‘folly & extravagance’ of his son George and anger at a villainous son-in-law who’d contracted syphilis still gave him the odd ‘occasion to drown and stupifie [his] thoughts’.101

  The year 1734 was one of panic about a new drinking craze among London’s poor. Caroline, among others, was stridently in favour of Parliament’s legislating against ‘Mother Gin’, or ‘Madam Geneva’ as it was also known. This strong and novel spirit was drunk by the pint, like beer, with devastating consequences, and was causing chaos in London. The streets were lined with the insensible bodies of the inebriated, while those still conscious showed the ‘utmost rage of resentment, violence of rudeness, and scurrility of tongue’.102 The lists of fatalities recorded in the newspapers began to include ‘excessive drinking of Geneva’ alongside the more familiar ‘drowned accidentally in the river of Thames’.103 Just two years later the draconian Gin Act was introduced, which sought – with limited success – to have gin sold only through recognised and licensed outlets.

  While the rich condemned the poor for the miserable manner of their escape from the urban grind, Lord Chesterfield nevertheless considered drinking deeply to be ‘a necessary qualification for a fine gentleman’.104 The Maids of Honour likewise refused to stint themselves. They could order as many bottles of wine as they liked to drink with their dinner (although the under-butlers always inflated the total in the official record and drank the difference themselves).105