Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  The men and women strolling through St James’s Park were becoming ever more extravagantly dressed, ‘embroidered and bedawb’d as much as the French’.103 A town lady sent a country cousin a bonnet with the warning: ‘don’t be frightened at its bigness, ’tis all the fashion … and what now every creature wears’.104

  The day dress for a young blade about town might by now have consisted of the frock coat, described as ‘a close body’d coat … with strait sleeves’.105 He could choose from a cornucopia of euphoniously named wig styles: ‘Pidgeon’s wing, Comet, Cauliflower, Royal Bird, Staircase, Wild Boar’s Back, She-dragon, Rose, Negligent, Cut Bob, Drop-wig, Snail Back, and Spinnage Seed’.106

  One extreme manifestation of 1740s fashion came in the form of the new ‘hoop-petticoats, narrow at the top, and monstrously wide at the bottom’.107 Richard Campbell, author of The London Tradesman, was quick to see their dual advantage: when they tipped up, they revealed the ‘secrets of the ladies’ legs, which we might have been ignorant of to eternity without their help’. Of more practical benefit, the demand they created for ‘whale bone renders them truly beneficial to our allies the Dutch’.108 An enormous 20 per cent of London’s labour force was employed in the clothing industry.

  At court, the archaic, other-worldly mantua was still the formal female dress, remaining obligatory for drawing-room evenings, coronations and royal weddings. The ordeal of wearing a mantua was more than familiar to Amalie von Wallmoden and Mary Deloraine, although people outside the palace walls had abandoned them long ago.

  A court mantua. The dress itself weighed ten pounds (it was made of silver thread), while the whalebone hoops burdened the wearer with the same again in weight. No wonder ladies complained about the agony of wearing them

  The immense cost of a mantua appropriate for George II’s drawing room lay in its expensive materials: silk and silver lace sold by weight. The cutting out and sewing of a gown cost less than 2 per cent of the total bill, and discarded dresses would sometimes be melted down to recover the precious metal. The dress Lady Huntingdon wore to Prince Frederick’s birthday celebration in 1738 nearly killed her with its metallic weight: she became ‘a mere shadow that tottered under every step she took under the load’.109

  While court fashions were antiquated and awkward, there was one new development: the mantua was gradually being ousted from pride of place by the hyper-elegant French alternative, which nevertheless went by the inelegant name of the ‘sacque’, or ‘sack’. Cut from just one piece of cloth, the sack featured the so-called ‘Watteau pleat’, a cascading pleat falling from the shoulders to the floor at the back. Seen on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s delicate painted ladies, it is ravishingly weird.

  An obsession with fashion was a well-recognised eighteenthcentury affliction. It was mocked by Alexander Pope in his poem about the small-minded ‘Chloe’ and her preference for things rather than people:

  She, while her lover pants upon her breast,

  Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;

  And when she sees her friend in deep despair,

  Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair.110

  The model that Pope had in mind when writing about Chloe was said to be Henrietta Berkeley. She was now happily occupied with her husband and with decorating and redecorating her house at Marble Hill. This was at the expense of maintaining the sympathetic correspondence that her friends had received from her during her miserable court servitude. Her happy home life meant that her former friendship with Alexander Pope had soured on his part to jealous disgust.

  Elsewhere in London, Molly Hervey, returned from France, had also been seduced by the new mania for decorating. She commissioned the architect Henry Flitcroft to design a house in St James’s Place. She mocked both it and her gout: ‘the one my amusement (for old people must not pretend to pleasures), and the other my torment’.111

  Now well used to her independence, her husband long gone and her eight children grown up, she enjoyed choosing her surroundings to please herself. She described herself as ‘deeply’ rooted in her garden, and wished that her plants would ‘flourish half as well’ as she did.

  The formerly sylph-like Molly was growing comfortably fat in middle age: ‘though I can’t say I have run up in height, yet I have spread most luxuriantly’.112

  *

  Not far from Molly’s chic London residence, William Kent in 1742 was working on a similar house in Berkeley Square for one of Princess Amelia’s ladies.113 But he was about to fall worryingly and ‘suddenly ill of his eyes’.114

  Kent was now living in his own little house nearly next door to his old friend the Earl of Burlington at Burlington House. His eye strain should have been a warning that his health needed more attention, but he still hadn’t discarded his feckless, pleasure-seeking lifestyle. In one of his letters Kent presents an amusing vignette of himself, the grumpy artist, being cured of a hangover by looking at pictures. In his customary telegraphese, Kent told a friend that one morning Alexander Pope had come round to his house ‘before I was up, it had rained all night & rained when he came I would not get up & sent him away to disturb somebody else – he came back & said could meet with nobody’.

  So Kent reluctantly got ‘drest & went with him’. Off they strolled to an art dealer’s, where they looked at pictures ‘& had great diversion’.115 Yet Kent and his chums were clearly overindulging their middle-aged bodies: one of Lord Burlington’s daughters would write archly in 1743 that Mr Kent ‘took all the potted hare with him so I can’t tell his opinion of it yet, but I dare say he will like it wondrously’.116

  A life of ‘high feeding and much inaction’ took its toll on the rosy-cheeked Signior

  Kent’s actress mistress, Elizabeth Butler, had by now abandoned the former royal haunt of Leicester Fields and moved to the suitably theatrical parish of Covent Garden. Like Kent, she was a self-made woman, and perhaps they were both too independent to share a single home. Elizabeth had two children, George and Elizabeth, and the supposition is that William Kent was their father.

  Elizabeth had become quite entrepreneurial, leasing part of her theatre, thereby receiving part of its profits, and renting a reasonably grand house in King Street. Her finances remained a little wobbly, though, and once she was locked out of her new home for six weeks because of unpaid bills.117

  Although Kent had ‘long lived’ with Elizabeth on these friendly, if semi-detached, terms, he was still half searching for something better.118 As he wrote to Lady Burlington, ‘I wonder when the time will come that I shall be in love?’119

  Kent’s latest professional accolade was to have been made portrait-painter to the king, although capturing likenesses had never been the strongest of his skills. It seems that even the inartistic George II found the idea of being painted by Kent too much to bear, and ‘declared he would never sit to him for his picture’.120

  *

  And Peter Wentworth would never serve the king again either. Without Caroline to jolly him out of his shyness and his drinking, he had died in alcoholic penury. In one rare and beseeching letter written shortly before his death, his otherwise silent wife Juliana begged a rich contact for financial help. She explained that she was writing behind her husband’s back because if Peter were given money directly, he would immediately squander it rather than pay off their numerous creditors. ‘Therefore I desire this may be a secret from him,’ she begged, ‘tho’ what I am doing I think wholly for his service.’121

  In 1738, Wentworth had written what was probably his last-ever letter to his brother, recounting new difficulties at court: ‘I can’t imagine who puts it into your head that I fall out with people, there are many people that have unaccountably fallen out with me.’ He griped about the ‘spite and malice of the world’. Writing almost indecipherably (and presumably under the influence), he rightly predicted that he would be ‘falling soon off this terestable Glob [terrestrial Globe]’.122

  At least his death was painless. He died very suddenly in his l
odgings in the Royal Mews, halfway through a hand of quadrille.123

  Peter Wentworth’s addictive illness had been so horrible, and his estate so squalidly indebted, that his relatives were almost relieved by his passing. His eldest son William was advised to try to stave off the many creditors pressing for payment by making ‘a voluntary declaration’ that he would ‘have nothing to do with any of his late father’s effects’.

  The bereaved young man had mixed emotions: sure, ‘he had a natural feeling for the loss of a father’, but ‘own’d he lived in such daily agony of something even worse than death befalling him … ’twas a mercy it pleased God to take him’.124

  Wentworth did bequeath his son one very valuable possession: the belief that a court life was not a good life. William Wentworth declared instead that ‘the summit of my ambition is to be easy & quiet from a long attendance as my father has had at court’.125

  The court – the very worst environment for an uncertain, unsuccessful, oversensitive soul – had chewed up Peter Wentworth and spat him out. Only Caroline, had she lived, could have kept him going.

  *

  By October 1742, the court had also lost the presence of Sir Robert Walpole, though this was greatly against the wishes of the aging king. George II had tried desperately hard to retain Walpole in office as First Lord of the Treasury, but Walpole’s political enemies had at long last grown too strong to resist. In February 1742, a major upheaval had seen ‘the grand Corrupter’ depart from power after losing a general election because of the unpopular Spanish war.

  This election had been the occasion of another spat between king and prince: George II had attempted to buy Prince Frederick’s support for Walpole’s precarious position by offering to add an extra £50,000 a year to the much-disputed allowance. Frederick’s refusal to bargain saw the king behaving like a caricature of himself, stirred by ‘great passions’ and ‘flinging off his wig’.126

  The cash-strapped prince eventually accepted the offer of the additional annuity. In an echo of the unwilling reconciliation of 1720, he managed to appear at a levee at St James’s, and his father managed to ask him, not too impolitely, if Princess Augusta was well.127 This brief and stilted conversation was, in fact, a triumph of goodwill for this particular father and son.

  Sir Robert Walpole’s departure from power meant a major alteration in the galaxy of political alliances. In the wake of his departure, his political acolyte John Hervey also flounced out of the royal circle in disgust. Hervey resigned from his relatively recent appointment to the government office of Privy Seal and refused the proffered royal pension in order to demonstrate his chagrin at the loss of his boss.

  Cast outside the inner circle, his health began to fail, although his vituperation against George II remained very venomous.

  *

  Despite the temporary turbulence caused by the departure of such significant characters, life at court from day to day chugged on monotonously. The remaining palace servants longed for a little excitement. ‘All I can say of Kensington’, wrote one weary courtier, ‘is that it is just the same as it was.’128

  Its habitués complained that a drawing-room evening was ‘a perpetual round of hearing the same scandal, and seeing the same follies acted over and over’.129 The institutionalised courtier turned into a kind of machine, ‘little superior to the court clock’, telling you ‘now it is levée, now dinner, now supper time, & c’.130 Everybody was ready for some new outrage to liven things up, and they were not to be disappointed.

  On the evening in the October of 1742 when matters came to a head between Amalie and Mary, card games were in progress, fans were fluttering, the silver in the ladies’ dresses was sparkling, the room was crowded with conversing courtiers and the two rival mistresses were glaring daggers at each other. At first everything seemed just as usual, but this would turn out to be a most memorable occasion.

  It was later described as the night of the ‘great fracas at Kensington’.131

  The ‘virtuous, and sober, and wise Deloraine’ (who was really none of these things) was sitting playing cards as usual. She had the habit of playing a nightly game with the old-time German courtier Augustus Schutz, known by his circle as the ‘court booby’.132 Winning money at cards was the highest hope of pleasure during many a dreary evening in the drawing room. George II’s favourite pastime was commerce, a game which ‘must surely have played its cards excellently well, to have kept its ground so long’.133 But Amalie preferred quadrille: her court nickname was ‘Madame Vole’, from the term ‘sans-prendre-vole’ that was called out during the game.134

  Mary Deloraine was probably not entirely sober on the evening of the ‘fracas’, and she was certainly vulnerable to pranksters. Now one of the princesses sought their revenge on their governess and old enemy. It was probably the audacious Amelia, who was still trapped in the role of unmarried daughter and required daily to decorate the drawing room.

  When Mary rose for a moment from the card table, a royal hand silently pulled the chair out from beneath her. As she sat, she lost her seat. Her fall to the floor was ignominious, horribly public … and much to the amusement of the king.

  This was the moment in which Mary realised that even the king himself was treating her with the contempt that she received from everybody else, and her self-control failed her. ‘Being provoked that her Monarch was diverted with her disgrace,’ rage boiled up in her, and she maliciously pulled the king’s seat out from under him in return.

  But this was a terrible error, which compounded her humiliation. George II was famously ‘mortal in the part which touched the ground’. His haemorrhoids made his fall even more painful than hers, both to his posterior and to his dignity. It was a matter beyond joking. Now, as Horace Walpole said, George II was ‘so hurt and so angry’ that Mary Deloraine was conclusively disgraced.135

  This small but significant incident was the sorry end of Mary’s ambition: long of waning power, her former lover now cast her out. Yes, he had taken ‘a taste of her’, but he ‘did not like that taste well enough to take any more’.136

  In Walpole’s words, ‘her German rival remains in the sole and quiet possession of her royal Master’s other side’.137

  *

  Amalie would henceforth be recognised as the king’s unofficial partner, even to the extent of appearing alongside him, in miniature, on top of a dessert served by the Countess of Northumberland. (This unusual compliment – a ‘clumsy apotheosis of her concubinage’ – in fact embarrassed her.138)

  An unusually intelligent princess, Amelia had ‘her ears shut to flattery, and her heart open to honesty’

  The newspapers now fell silent upon the subject of Mary Deloraine’s court appearances and parties, previously so frequently chronicled, and she embarked upon a quick and quiet decline. In 1743, her and Mr Wyndham’s only son died, and a couple of months later it was reported that Mary herself lay ‘dangerously ill’ in her apartments at St James’s Palace.139 She was exiled to Twickenham, on the Thames, the resting place of so many discarded mistresses, ‘by the advice of the physicians, for the recovery of her health’.140

  But the spell in rehab failed, and Mary expired on 9 November 1744, only two years after her drawing-room defeat.141 It was almost as if she died of humiliation.

  * And yet, and yet, there could be no real winner in this battle of the mistresses.

  The king kept the promise he made to Caroline on her deathbed: he would never replace her. Despite his promiscuity, he longed to be faithful; despite his predatory behaviour with women, he only really wanted the one he couldn’t have.

  Amalie could never quite measure up to the lost Caroline, and her triumph seemed unlikely to last for long. If the king required sex – which he did – there would always be younger, prettier women than her.

  Dying when she did, in November 1744, Mary Deloraine lived just long enough to experience the opening skirmishes of the next battle of the mistresses. In a satirical pamphlet published that year, John
Hervey suggested that Amalie had been once more threatened in her position as chief mistress by Viola, a dancer from France. The king had hopes that Viola would prove herself to be a ‘more vivacious companion’ than Amalie, who could ‘never pretend to excel’ in ‘les Engagements de l’Amour’.

  So the German Amalie lost to a French dancer the power over the king that she’d possessed for ‘so many years’, despite ‘the rival beauty of the British ladies’ and their efforts to snatch it from her.142

  Had she lived long enough to see it, Mary Deloraine would have been filled with spite and delight.

  Notes

  1. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 609.

  2. Hailes (1788), p. 39.

  3. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 904.

  4. Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 609.

  5. Hervey (1744), p. 16.

  6. Hervey (1931), Vol. 3, p. 918.

  7. Matthew Kilburn, ‘Wallmoden, Amalie Sophie Marianne von, suo jure countess of Yarmouth (1704–1765)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford,2004).

  8. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 609.

  9. Brooke (1985), Vol. 1, p. 117.

  10. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 603; translation by Katherine Ibbett.

  11. HMC 11th Report, Appendix, Part IV, The Manuscripts of the Marquess Townshend (London, 1887), p. 356, Ashe Windham to [Charles, third Viscount Townshend?] (22 June 1738).

  12. General Evening Post, issue 5674 (22 February 1770), Baron Bielfield, ‘A Character of the celebrated Countess of Yarmouth’; Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 457.

  13. General Evening Post, ibid.

  14. Hervey (1931), Vol. 2, p. 484.

  15. Ibid., p. 486.

  16. HMC Egmont, Vol. 2 (1923), pp. 369–70.