Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (18 page)

Peter’s new suits were like straitjackets to him, and gradually his clothes changed his very posture. His tight court coat, cut much more restrictively than a modern jacket, meant that ‘crawling or scrambling about, would now be more troublesome to him, than walking upright’.
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Eighteenth-century court garments were designed to make the wearer stand up straight – shoulders lowered, chest puffed out, toes turned out – and they began to do their work upon the Wild Boy.

In time Peter grew fond of his fine clothes. He’d always liked the gleam of gold, and if a courtier was wearing ‘anything smooth or shining in his dress’, he would spot it at once and ‘shew his attention by stroaking it’.
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He also learnt to pick pockets, from the most innocent of motives: ‘if he finds nuts or fruits, he is very glad of them’.
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Jonathan Swift’s pamphlet about Peter concluded with a spoof advert ‘to warn all ladies and gentlemen who intend to visit this Wild Man’ not to carry anything ‘indecent’ in their pockets, as he’d inevitably whip it out and embarrass them.
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This was charming and amusing. But when Peter stepped over the invisible line that defined acceptable behaviour, he was beaten on the legs with a ‘broad leather strap to keep him in awe’.
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His shock and confusion can only be imagined. Everyone was fascinated by the idea of the Wild Boy, but it seemed that no one really cared for the human child.

He began to pine for a return to the woods.

*

Eventually, a turning point came during a dinner at the king’s table. George I invited Peter to taste any of the many dishes upon the table, but the Wild Boy threw his food about and refused to touch meat. He’d only eat ‘asparagus, or other garden-things’.
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Exasperated, the king ordered that Peter should be given the food he preferred, but also commanded that the Wild Boy should embark upon a course of ‘instruction as may best fit him for human society’.
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Now Peter the Wild Boy was fortunate enough to find a friend. He was ‘committed to the care of Dr Arbuthnot’, one of the king’s
physicians, in order to be taught to speak and be ‘made a sociable creature’.
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According to the rationalists at court, a little application would bring certain success, and Peter would become fully human at last.

The brilliant Dr John Arbuthnot. ‘Inattentive in company’, his ‘imagination was always at work’

 

Dr John Arbuthnot is yet another of the figures depicted in William Kent’s staircase at Kensington Palace. He’s the elderly man in a plain brown coat standing just behind Peter. (This portrait was usually known as the ‘Mysterious Quaker’ before his real identity was deduced.) Dr Arbuthnot would now prove himself to be a credit to his profession: gentle, caring and humane.

Born in Scotland in 1667, he’d trained at the Marischal College in Aberdeen before heading south, studying mathematics and becoming Queen Anne’s physician in 1709. As well as being an eminent scientist, he was also a member of the witty and iconoclastic society of writers called the Scriblerus Club. His friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were also members.

In Dr Arbuthnot’s best-known satirical book,
The History of
John Bull
, the grumpy Everyman character John Bull personifies the English people: red-faced, beer-drinking, plain-speaking,
Frenchman-hating. Yet Dr Arbuthnot’s jokes were gentle rather than savage, ‘like flaps of the face given in jest … no blackness will appear after the blows’.
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Despite his talent and appetite for satire, he always managed to avoid giving offence. Unusually, he managed to remain ‘in great esteem with the whole court’ as a philosopher, a mathematician and a ‘character of uncommon virtue and probity’.
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It’s a relief to find that Dr Arbuthnot did have at least one imperfection of character: he was hopelessly addicted to cards. Despite all the hours of practice he put in, he remained a dreadful player. On one renowned occasion, which gave much amusement to his friends, he played two games of quadrille against a dog and was still ‘most shamefully beaten’.
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And he also had some kind of physical problem with his legs. One friend joked that Dr Arbuthnot was ‘a man that can do everything but walk’, which he did with ‘a sort of slouch’.
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Indeed, on the King’s Grand Staircase, William Kent painted the doctor leaning upon his indispensable stout stick.

The Scottish doctor was given ‘an apartment joining’ onto Peter’s at the palace, and together they began the process of civilisation.
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The Wild Boy had daily lessons in language and manners. His progress was slow and painful, as he had ‘a natural tendency to get away if not held by his coat’.
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Yet it doesn’t sound as if Dr Arbuthnot was capable of a sustained campaign of terror. ‘Inattentive in company’, his ‘imagination was always at work’ and his mind frequently wandered off the topic at hand.
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Even the satirists allowed that he had shown ‘care, skill and tenderness’ in trying to tame the Wild Boy.
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Opinion was divided about whether Dr Arbuthnot was successful or not. Peter did indeed learn how to ‘pronounce and utter after his tutor words of one syllable’ and, like a performing dog, he learnt a few social graces: he could kiss his fingers and bow.
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Yet others thought that Dr Arbuthnot had failed, despite all his efforts, and that Peter still retained ‘the natural wildness in all his actions and behaviour’.
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And Peter would never really engage
with other people through language, thereby disappointing all the earnest supporters who wished him well. Even with the advantage of hindsight, it’s not exactly clear what Peter’s condition was. It is likely that he was autistic, but medical opinion cannot agree upon whether he was born with his condition and abandoned in the woods by a mother who thought him defective, or whether he became the way he was because of an early family tragedy which left him completely alone and without social stimulus.

Unlike many others, Dr Arbuthnot remained absolutely convinced that Peter the Wild Boy did indeed have a soul. Despite the slow ebbing of the court’s confidence that Peter would ever learn to speak, Dr Arbuthnot kept faith with his pupil. He arranged for Peter to be baptised at his own home in Cork Street.
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*

Peter the Wild Boy made his first appearance in George I’s drawing room on 7 April, and he’d been promised to Princess Caroline soon afterwards. We left Caroline waiting in vain for the arrival of her new servant, for the king and court were reluctant to let Peter go. And the king showed no great generosity towards the princess, who had stood so firmly by her husband during the quarrel of recent years. He treated her respectfully, but ‘he never cordially loved her’.
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Now aged forty-three, Caroline had become a meaty mountain of a woman. The fame of her prodigious bosom was so great that some people were actually disappointed by its reality. ‘The Princess is really a good fine woman,’ one visitor to the court wrote to a country neighbour, but ‘her breasts they make such a wonder at I don’t think exceed Mrs Abell’s in size’.
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It was 16 April 1726 before Jonathan Swift could report that he had been to Princess Caroline’s house in Leicester Square and had found Peter in residence there at last. (Swift sourly joked that he’d only received his own invitation to Leicester House because Princess Caroline, obsessed with the ‘wild Boy from Germany’, also ‘had a curiosity to see a wild Dean from Ireland’.
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)

Caroline’s genuine curiosity about odd people and strange
things stemmed from both her background and character. She’d been born in the sleepy German principality of Ansbach, orphaned early and adopted by the court of Prussia. While her formal education was very poor, she did at least in her youth make friends with the rationalist philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. He introduced her to the world of ideas (and would develop his celebrated calculating machine while librarian to the Hanoverian court).

Although Caroline lacked a dowry, she was placed upon the European marriage market for princesses, and the Catholic courts of Europe were baffled when she dithered about accepting a flattering matrimonial offer from the future king of Spain.

Leibniz went against the trend in noting that ‘every one predicts the Spanish crown for her, but she deserves something surer than that’.
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In fact, Princess Caroline was deeply reluctant to make the conversion to Catholicism necessary for the Spanish match. People reported that ‘First the Princess of Ansbach says “Yes” and then “No”. First she says we Protestants have no valid priests, then that Catholics are idolatrous and accursed.’ There were reports that the Jesuit tasked with converting her frequently argued Caroline into tears.
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Eventually, the Spanish match was off. Princess Caroline won much respect for her resolute Protestantism, and people praised her for having ‘scorn’d an empire for religion’s sake’, as John Gay put it.
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She would remain a lifelong religious radical, more intrigued by the twists and turns of religious doctrine than by stolid service to the established church.

A little later she was wooed again, this time by Prince George Augustus (then of Hanover). He began his campaign of courtship incognito before declaring his hand and being accepted. The court of Hanover was delighted with his choice, and there were ‘many healths drunk’ to the engaged couple in 1705.
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Caroline had always been ‘a most entertaining companion’, an autodidact fonder of speaking than writing.
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Her effusive but illegible letters, written in French, are terribly difficult to decipher,
and her husband complained that she wrote ‘like a cat’.
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Always in too much of a hurry, Caroline would scribble ‘
asteur
’ when she meant ‘
à cette heure
’; ‘Harriet Campbell’ became ‘hariet cambel’, and ‘Isabella Finch’ became ‘belle fintzche’.
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Her friends agreed that she spelt very badly, ‘but then she taught herself to write, so it’s no wonder’.
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Palace parties were often tedious and depressing to this princess who liked to talk philosophy. She was a stalwart supporter of Sir Isaac Newton, despite his epic row with her other pet philosopher Leibniz about which of them had discovered calculus. She admired Newton tremendously and told ‘the whole circle’ in the drawing room that she was honoured to have lived in the same age as such a great man.
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The less-than-charitable thought Princess Caroline’s philosophical fancies were pretentious, and they scoffed at her for ‘pretending to understand the metaphysicks of Leibniz’.
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But her critics didn’t understand that she was successfully following a German rather than a British pattern for royal females. By taking culture seriously, Caroline was admirably fulfilling the job description of an eighteenth-century queen as it existed in the German states. There it was expected that the female half of a royal couple would lead the social life of a court, welcome guests and sparkle in erudite conversation, and Princess Caroline came from a grand tradition of clever, lively women who had ignited the courts of Germany.
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The dying words of Sophie Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, George I’s sister, summed up their intellectualism and what can best be described as their tolerance rather than enjoyment of conventional court life: ‘Do not pity me. I am at last going to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things, which even Leibniz could never explain to me. As for the King, my husband,’ she nonchalantly added, ‘well, I shall afford him the opportunity of giving me a magnificent funeral, and displaying all the pomp he loves so much.’
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