Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

by Lucy Worsley

  The sedan chairs that did manage to totter towards the sparse drawing rooms of the reign’s closing years came through a London much better built than that of 1720. An architect wrote that George II’s period in power had seen bare boards (stained brown ‘with soot and small beer to hide the dirt’) give way to carpeted floors, stone hearths replaced by marble, the woven rush seats of chairs superseded by damask upholstery.17 But despite these improvements in living standards, the city was still incommoded with dirt and disease. In August 1760, there’d been a cull of rabid dogs, with two shillings promised for every canine corpse.

  Meanwhile, at Kensington Palace, Jane Keen, the old housekeeper, was distracted by a messy and ridiculous legal dispute with the neighbouring parish over a footpath: ‘if they will send me to jail I promise you I am ready to go’.18 Damp seeped into the bones of the surviving residents of this palace built over a running stream, and many of the courtiers once familiar to us had already passed over the Styx.

  Horace Walpole’s father, Sir Robert, was long dead. He had been ushered out of life in 1745 by none other than the Dr John Ranby who had also supervised Queen Caroline’s departure.

  Like Walpole senior, John Hervey had never really recovered his spirits after they both left government office in 1742. Only a year after the battle of the rival mistresses he too was dying, of ‘disappointment, rage and a distempered condition’.19

  In one of his final letters, written in June 1743, Hervey celebrated the only one of his significant relationships to survive: that with his tireless correspondent Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘The last stages of an infirm life are filthy roads,’ he wrote in his final farewell to her. ‘May all your ways … be ways of pleasantness, and all your paths peace … Adieu.’20

  John Hervey wrote an epitaph for himself that summed up all the warped but in some ways laudable integrity that led to his unhappy, fruitless and isolated later years:

  Few men he lik’d, and fewer still believ’d,

  Fewest of all he trust’d, none deceiv’d;

  But as from temper, principle or pride,

  To gain whom he dislik’d he never try’d.

  And this the pride of others disapprov’d,

  So lik’d by many, few by he was lov’d.21

  It had been a long time since he had loved and been loved by his treated her with extraordinary harshness in his will, leaving her the bare legal minimum: ‘Whatever I am obliged to leave my wife by the writing signed at our marriage she must have. I leave her nothing more.’22 The will caused a scandal, and it was said that John Hervey had ‘finished his charming character by it’.23

  Molly, with fine diplomacy, found her late husband ‘no more to be mistaken, or forgot, than to be imitated, being indeed inimitable’.24

  She, like so many others, had given her heart unwisely to a courtier. Yet, by leaving the court behind, she managed to survive, and indeed, for many years, to thrive.

  Hopefully Molly was past caring about old injuries by 1760, when her own failing health began to cause her trouble. Of course, she made light of her ‘great weakness’ with flashes of the wit of the scintillating seventeen-year-old Mistress Lepell: ‘I … slide once or twice up and down my room, with the help of a cane on one side, and a strong servant on the other; but I cannot call it walking.’25 Her difficulties were caused by gout, even though she wore on her feet warm ‘bootikins’ intended to ‘keep up the perspiration, which everybody knows is the only thing that can be done’ for the disorder.26

  Some people still remembered verses written about Molly in her twenties; their author had been in love with her, ‘as everybody was then’. A friend asked her one day if she recollected this particular poem and its reference to her queue of fifty suitors. ‘Do you think’, Molly asked in return, ‘that we women ever forget flattery?’27

  It was as well that Molly did not take herself too seriously, for the children who should have been the consolations of her old age had brought nothing but trouble. Her favourite son Augustus had married one Elizabeth Chudleigh, who notoriously went on to become a bigamist (or so it was claimed) when she also married the Duke of Kingston.

  And Molly’s daughter-in-law Elizabeth Chudleigh would vigorously challenge Amalie von Wallmoden (now Yarmouth) as a late pretender to the title of royal mistress.

  *

  Elizabeth Chudleigh first entered court circles when she was appointed as a Maid of Honour to ‘Princess Prudence’, Augusta, who was married to ‘poor’ Frederick, Prince of Wales. Soon afterwards she met Augustus Hervey, Molly’s sailor son. In a strange echo of Molly’s own story, in 1744 Augustus and Elizabeth entered into a rushed and passionate marriage, a ‘scrambling shabby business’ that was kept secret from both of their families because it was a form of financial suicide for both of them. Just like Molly, Elizabeth would have lost her job as Maid of Honour if she were known to be married.28

  In September 1747, Elizabeth obtained a short leave of absence from her post in order to give birth secretly to a short-lived son. Augustus was now spending long periods at sea. By New Year 1749, he and Elizabeth had decided to split. He recorded in his journal that he had ‘carried it very cool with Miss Chudleigh’ and decided to go abroad, ‘never having any more to do in that affair’.29

  Later the couple would deny that they had ever been married, but a few witnesses insisted otherwise. Another prudish Victorian Hervey descendant tantalisingly wielded the scissors once again, cutting out and destroying some further and possibly illuminating passages about Elizabeth from Augustus’s diary. This diary might otherwise have definitively cleared up the still unanswered question of whether or not they had been legally wed.30

  The year 1749, and the rowdy celebrations of the Peace of Aixla-Chapelle, brought Molly’s daughter-in-law (or daughter-in-sin) to prominence. Still claiming to be an unmarried Maid of Honour, Elizabeth created a sensation at a masquerade at Somerset House by appearing in a vestigial costume as Iphigenia, ready (un)dressed for the sacrifice at Aulis.

  The masqueraders included an old man who asked if she would be kind enough to let him give her a squeeze. The king’s disguise failed to conceal his identity, so Elizabeth took advantage of the situation for a piece of charming cheek. Grabbing his hand, ‘she replied that she would put it to a still softer place, and immediately raised it to his royal forehead’.31

  Inevitably George II was smitten, and with this a new claimant to the title of chief mistress entered the running. The insolent Elizabeth was overheard declaring that Amalie was dismissed and that she was delighted to belong ‘to a King who turns off an old mistress when he has got a new one’ rather than keeping both of them on the go simultaneously.32 The German faction at court panicked because ‘their Countess [Amalie] is on the wane’.

  Elizabeth’s mother was awarded the lucrative position of housekeeper at Windsor Castle, and Elizabeth herself was distinguished in the drawing-room circle, ‘against all precedent’, with a kiss from the king. Marvellous vistas of possible power opened up: ‘why should not experience and a charming face on her side, and near seventy years on his, produce a title?’33

  But Mistress Chudleigh had overreached herself. Amalie was not permanently dismissed, George II tired of his liaison – if indeed it really was one – and Elizabeth had to console herself with the second string to her bow, the Duke of Kingston, whom she now persuaded to marry her. And she enjoyed life as a duchess, at least until the unresolved matter of her possible previous marriage to Augustus Hervey came to light. London was thrilled by Elizabeth’s subsequent trial for bigamy.

  Fortunately Molly remained on speaking terms with the foolish but lively Augustus. After various rows, her dull and decorous son Frederick and daughter Lepell had cut themselves off from her completely. Molly claimed that ‘there is no difficulty I cannot surmount to please those I love,’ but her pride meant that this was not quite true.34 She was hurt by the long-running quarrels she had with her children over what they saw as her embarrassing, unconventional
behaviour.

  Since her estrangement from the Hanoverian court, Molly had been a fairly open Jacobite. Her friends noticed that she always wore white roses on 10 June to commemorate the birthday of the Pretender and described ‘how angry she used to grow if anybody, to teaze her, brought up the story of the warming-pan’.35 During her spells of living in France, Molly had even flirted with Roman Catholicism. Well-wishers worried that ‘she has changed her principles in politics, and her religious ones I have heard were in danger’.36

  But her sense of self and her sense of humour were safe.

  *

  Molly’s late husband, with typical bitterness, had called William Kent ‘a man much in fashion as a gardener, an architect, a painter, and about fifty other things, with a very bad taste and little understanding’.37 But his many friends were sorry to have lost Kent’s effervescent company when his unhealthy lifestyle – ‘high feeding and much inaction’ – led to his death in 1748.38

  Grown plump upon his royal patronage, Kent had become the bustling and successful creator of country houses and gardens throughout Britain. In later years, ‘The Signior’ (as he was still called) ‘often gave his orders when he was full of Claret’, leading to poor decisions and his workmen’s time and money being wasted.39 He still had his detractors, who continued to mock his conceits:

  Rare Architect, in whose exotick school

  Our English connoisseurs may learn by rule

  To spoil their Houses and to play the fool.40

  Even in later life Kent had preferred to spend more time with Lord Burlington than with his mistress Elizabeth Butler, and during his last illness he was attended for more than a fortnight ‘with great care at Burlington House’. He died on 12 April of ‘a mortification in his bowels & feet especially inflamed’ and was carried from Lord Burlington’s house in ‘a hearse & 9 mourning coaches to Chiswick’. There his coffin was laid to rest in the vault of the Burlingtons, so that in due course he would lie beside his near lifelong patron and friend.41 An inscription on his coffin gave him sixty-four years of age.

  Despite his closeness to his old benefactor in these final days, William Kent had not forgotten Elizabeth Butler. His will revealed that she was still living in the thespian parish of Saint Paul, Covent Garden.42 He left £600 to her and £300 to each of their two children, George and Elizabeth. These two were to become orphans only five months later when Elizabeth Butler followed Kent, her on-and-off partner of a lifetime, to the grave.43

  She was described as a ‘widow’ in these closing stages of her life, so perhaps her lover, despite his fear of commitment, had finally married her.44

  Although Kent may have died, the style he created would live on for ever. ‘Kentissime’ is the word that Horace Walpole used to describe the best work of the Earl of Burlington’s beloved ‘Kentino’.

  *

  Unlike John Hervey, George II in his old age had begun to lose something of his sting. ‘I am sick to death of all this foolish stuff,’ he could still be heard to bellow. ‘The devil take the Parliament, and the devil take the whole island, provided I can get out of it and go to Hanover.’45 While he remained full of bluster, it was growing increasingly impotent.

  He could now be neutralised by something sorely lacking earlier on: humour. One courtier, who needed the king’s signature on a form to validate the awarding of an honour, found him unwilling to approve the candidate proposed. ‘Give it the devil, if you will,’ the king bawled in his customary curt manner.

  The quick-witted courtier filled in the form and then read out: ‘George II, by the grace of God, & c. to his trusty and well-beloved friend the devil, greeting.’ This put the king into a mood good enough to sign as asked.46

  As he entered his eighth decade, George II’s way of life became startlingly secluded, almost like his father’s had been. A visitor to Kensington Palace in 1756 reported that he ‘goes to bed alone, rises, lights his fire and mends it himself … and is up several hours before he calls anybody’.47 His most riotous social occasions were the summer Saturdays when he travelled, ‘regularly as clockwork’, down to Richmond to dine with Amalie and a few of ‘the late queen’s ladies’. They went ‘in the middle of the day, with the heavy horse-guards kicking up the dust before them, dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned’.48 The king liked a sermon to be less than fifteen minutes long as twenty would send him off to sleep.49 ‘He’ll have no more night drawing rooms’, Molly Hervey heard, ‘owing to his eyes being too bad.’50

  In years gone by the reclusive habits of George I had brought him endless bad publicity, but the elderly George II did not suffer in the same way. This was partly because ideas about monarchy were changing by the 1750s. Respectability and economy were becoming expected of a king, perhaps even more so than ceremony and show. ‘The King’s manner of living would not diminish my idea of a King,’ remarked one visitor to the shrouded Kensington Palace, because it looked like he diligently ‘applied to business’ and submitted only reluctantly ‘to the pageantry’ of monarchy.51

  It remained the case that trivial matters riled the king most. When he was in his very worst temper, ‘and the devil to everybody that comes near him, it is always because one of his pages has powdered his periwig ill, or a housemaid set a chair where it does not use to stand, or something of that kind’.52 The kinder and more indulgent courtiers suggested that ‘some allowance must be made for the infirmities of great old age’.53 Behind his back, they now giggled rather than trembled and called him ‘Old Square-toes’.54

  Rather than simply writing him off as an crude and ignorant boor, as so many historians have done, we might likewise take a more charitable view that sums up George II’s image problem: an essential lack of subtlety. He may have been bad-tempered, but he was always sincere; ‘he might offend, but he never deceived’.55

  Although he’d long had Amalie to comfort him, George II still missed his wife. With sentimental resolution, he had ‘never suffered the Queen’s room to be touched since she died’. For more than twenty years, its fireplace had still contained the same wood that had been laid but not lit during her last days.56 The king also cherished Caroline’s old servants. John Teed, the queen’s former chocolate-maker, remained on the books as a part-time ‘Extraordinary Page of the Backstairs’, doubtless with light duties.57 And in his private rooms the king kept a portrait of Peter the Wild Boy.58

  A rather moving painting of George II depicts him as he was in 1759. He stands at the top of William Kent’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace; Yeomen of the Guard are glimpsed in the background. The king was by now deaf and blind in one eye. He found that time now dragged heavily: his affairs insufficient ‘to fill up the day; his amusements are without variety, & have lost their relish; he becomes fretful and uneasy merely for want of employment’.59 Yet this portrait, based on a lightning sketch taken of the king unawares, makes him look tranquil, relaxed, half-smiling at a courtier just out of view. He looks kindly, capable of compassion, very human.

  When someone close to him lost a child, the king had always been deeply and movingly sympathetic. One of those who witnessed this tenderness thought it was ‘his real disposition and way of thinking’, while his famed temper tantrums were temporary: ‘a fit, or a storm’.60

  His own children, on the other hand, had often found him horribly hard of heart. He had never been slow to have them whipped.61 One of his grandsons developed a lifelong loathing of Hampton Court Palace, for example, associating it with harsh beatings administered by the king himself. George II had forever acted the king with his children, treating them with ‘all the reserve and majesty of his rank’.

  In Horace Walpole’s opinion this was a fatal flaw: he could have had a happy life if only ‘he had never hated his father, or had ever loved his son’.62 But the king’s own parents had taught him that royal fathers and mothers could not afford to grow fond of their offspring and that political considerations took precedence.This was a lesson in enduring loss that it took many yea
rs for him to unlearn. Only in his dotage did George II’s feelings of paternal pride start slowly to sprout once more. One by one, his children began to predecease him, and he began to realise what he had lost.

  ‘I know I did not love my children when they were young,’ he freely admitted. ‘I hated to have them running into my room.’ But now, as he said, he loved them ‘as well as most fathers’.63

  As it was with his wife, so it proved with his children: love grew strongest in the hour of parting. ‘He is in very low spirits,’ murmured the courtiers.64

  *

  Unlike the king, Prince Frederick had managed to overcome the difficulties of his own upbringing in order to become a wonderful father to his own family. ‘My dear children,’ he would write to them, ‘you have giv’n me too much joy to-day.’65 (These children included a much-loved, physically disabled daughter, described as a ‘dwarf’ and named Elizabeth.66) At Leicester House there was ‘all the freedom of private life, all the festivity of wit’, in contrast to Kensington Palace, where there was ‘little but the gloomy pomp of state and court etiquette’.67

  Frederick’s relationship with his father never really recovered from the intense quarrels of the 1730s. In 1747, George II announced that ‘his son, for whom he did not care a louse, was to succeed him, and would live long enough to ruin us all’.68

  Surprisingly, though, the expected reign of a kind King Frederick would never arrive. On 20 March 1751, the prince died. Some people said that an accidental blow to the head from a cricket ball had finished him off, but an account of his final moments shows that the immediate cause of death was a pulmonary embolism, or a clot of blood in the lungs, which stopped him from breathing. Prince Frederick had been complaining of pleurisy pains in his chest since catching a cold in Kew Gardens three weeks previously.69