Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (20 page)

The Wild Boy was a thrilling novelty at court. He brought a breath of fresh air into its stale confines, and to imagine seeing it through his eyes is to see something of its strangeness. But the court already contained another, very different, royal servant called Peter. This second Peter had arrived by a much more conventional route.

Peter Wentworth was an equerry. It was his job to accompany the king if he walked abroad from his private rooms, and to ride alongside whenever the royal coach left the palace. Wentworth was an insider, an old hand, and a witness to decades of changing court fortunes. To him the court was the world: familiar, fatiguing, of fundamental importance in his life. While he had the dedication of a true courtier, he also suffered from a sense of gnawing and growing frustration. 

The Wentworths were a worthy, respectable, upright family. Peter’s older brother Thomas, Earl of Strafford, was Britain’s ambassador to Berlin. His own court career had begun long ago, as an equerry to George, Prince of Denmark, Queen Anne’s rather tedious husband. (‘I have tried him drunk’, Charles II said of Prince George, ‘and tried him sober and there’s nothing in him.’) At Prince George’s death, Peter transferred to Queen Anne’s own household.

While Peter Wentworth spent his undemanding days opening doors and standing to attention in the drawing room, he had a secret skill unsuspected by his courtier colleagues: he was a natural and gifted writer. He penned frequent and gossipy letters to his brother, first in Berlin and then later in rural retirement in England. As a long-time, if lowly, cog in the court machine, he vividly
recorded the high dramas and low tricks of court life. His is one of the best accounts, for example, of the dramatic deathbed scene in 1714, when the dying Queen Anne averted the danger of the Stuart succession by handing the symbolic staff of the Treasurer’s office to the Hanoverian-inclined Duke of Shrewsbury.
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Wentworth’s letters were always deliciously full of court gossip, mercilessly exposing pretence, artifice and greed. His keen eyes and flapping ears missed nothing. Hopelessly indiscreet, he forwarded the scurrilous ballads the courtiers loved, accompanied by half-hearted injunctions to secrecy. He typically signed off with: ‘I think here’s a pretty deal of scandal for one letter.’

Wentworth had embarked upon his court career in high hope of winning high office. But he suffered from asthma, his progress had stalled, and by the 1720s he stood in sore need of a lucky break. ‘I married young’, he explained in his own defence, ‘& set out in the world with a smaller fortune than I ought.’ He righteously claimed never to have ‘lost any money at play, nor laid out any money upon whores’.
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And yet his money simply seemed to disappear. As well as a wife and numerous children, he also had to support a small country estate in Dorset. It had been a foolish purchase, for the land was ‘miserably worn out by bad tenants’.
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Juliana, his wife, left back in Dorset with their brood, must have had constant call upon the ‘patience and resignation to the will of God’ for which she was celebrated by her friends.
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The year 1714, and the change of regime, brought with it new opportunities. At the very moment of George I’s landing at Greenwich, Wentworth pushed others aside to welcome the new king. He proudly told his brother that he’d reached out to George I ‘to help him out of the barge, the Duke of Shrewsbury presented me to kiss the King’s hand’.
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This was a valuable coup in Wentworth’s world of constant, cut-throat competition, where success was expressed through the tiniest of details.

Wentworth thought he ought to be made a Groom of the Bedchamber, the next rank up from his own. ‘I wou’d not be a Querry [equerry] all my life time,’ he chuffed in frustration.
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On 6
August 1714, he appealed to his powerful brother the earl: ‘this day I have taken the oath of office to King George, but I hope to God you’ll get me something better’.
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John Gay, the former silk mercer’s apprentice who had a secret soft spot for duchesses

 

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His was a typical ambition, and many, many others likewise nearly broke their hearts during the great mad quest for promotion at court. The struggle for employment, explained Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was almost a physical one: ‘there’s a little door to get in and a great crowd without, shoving and thrusting who shall be the foremost’.
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The jobless and impecunious poet John Gay was even lower on the ladder than Peter Wentworth. A former silk mercer’s apprentice, he haunted the court of the Prince and Princess of Wales at Leicester House in pursuit of a paid post. Their mutual friends joked that the inept gambler Dr Arbuthnot and John Gay both had unfortunate vices: ‘The Dr. goes to cards, Gay to court; one loses money, one loses his time.’
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Gay wrote a poem about the monotonous evenings devoted to chasing the remote hope of a court job. He always found it hard
to get up from his writing desk in good time, and had to dress in high haste before pressing ‘through the crowd of needy courtiers’:

Gay planned to better himself by dedicating a new book (his celebrated
Fables
) to Princess Caroline’s son; by dining ‘daily with the Maids of Honour’; by promiscuously sucking up to more important people.
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‘Mr Gay was your servant yesterday,’ wrote Alexander Pope to a female friend; ‘I believe to-day he may be Mrs Lepell’s.’
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Gay received some insightful advice from a court insider, his friend Henrietta Howard. She fondly chided him for his futile search for office and told him to exercise his true talents as a writer, rather than following his snobbish dreams. ‘Your head is your best friend,’ she told him. ‘It wou’d clothe, lodge and wash you but you neglect it, and follow that false friend your heart.’
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Back in 1714, Peter Wentworth, likewise dangerously seduced by the glamour of the court, found himself in stomach-churning suspense about the appointment of the Grooms of the Bedchamber. But despite his acute analysis of the characters of everyone around him, Wentworth’s colleagues tended to sideline someone with so little visible self-confidence. ‘A modest merit, with a large share of impudence’ was more certain of success at court than ‘the greatest qualification without it’.
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Not surprisingly, Wentworth found himself overlooked once again when the new Grooms of the Bedchamber were announced.

Making a resolution at last to act more positively, he selected Baron Görtz, George I’s Hanoverian treasurer, as his counsellor.
Wentworth proposed the cheaper and slightly humiliating expedient of being made ‘Groom Extraordinary’ while retaining his lower salary as an equerry.
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Baron Görtz now assured Wentworth that if there were to be a ‘Groom Extraordinary’, the job would indeed be his, but that there were no plans for appointing one at present. Wentworth just had to wait.

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Peter Wentworth’s contemporary, Thomas Burnet, had an even more gruelling tale of desire and delay. He spent a whole tedious half-decade at court without employment, seeking a job simply by hanging round in the drawing room every single day. If a man ‘can hold out five years’, Burnet calculated, ‘tis morally impossible he should not come into play’.

These five years were costly, both financially and emotionally. Burnet complained constantly about ‘this cursed Court attendance’. ‘I confess I am pretty heartily tired of it,’ he groaned.
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If he failed to get a job, he thought, he would have wasted ‘half of the very flower of his life’ standing waiting outside a door.
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Still, Thomas Burnet was eventually rewarded with ‘much a better thing’ than he’d ever hoped for: the offer of the position of British consul in Lisbon.
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And John Gay, too, was finally offered a job. Princess Caroline had by now given birth to seven surviving children. While her three elder daughters remained with her father-in-law, the king, the youngest three children lived with her at Leicester House. The proffered post was in the tiny fledgling household of the very youngest daughter, and even Gay was affronted by its insignificance. He decided that this most obscure backwater of the court was beneath his notice. Despite its salary of
£
200 a year, he eventually declined the office of Gentleman Usher to the baby Princess Louisa.

His friends worried about his rashness in refusing, saying that he had just as little foresight of age, sickness, poverty or the loss of his admirers as a girl of fifteen.
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Yet this eventual curdling of his court
hopes did Gay a world of good. He was forced to stop loitering about the palace and to seek theatrical success in the city outside.

But Peter Wentworth’s wait was not to have such a happy ending. He subsequently found out that Baron Görtz had betrayed him. Despite the baron’s reassurances, the post of ‘Groom Extraordinary’ did indeed exist, but it had been offered to and accepted by someone else ten days earlier. The treacherous Görtz was no friend, and Wentworth should have known ‘he that holds a courtier by the hand, has a wet eel by the tail’.
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In his letters to his brother, Wentworth’s bewildered pain leaps from the page. ‘I have an innate horrid quality of an unaccountable foolish bashfulness,’ Wentworth sighed in low moments.
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He lacked the knack of making friends, as well as that of making money. By 1726, he was growing old in his search for a better job.

And he was becoming ever more dangerously devoted to the cure for his ‘foolish bashfulness’, a cure that came in a bottle.

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Peter Wentworth had the kind of in-between status that allowed him to roam at will throughout Kensington Palace, both in the state apartments at the top of the stairs and in the extensive servants’
quarters at the bottom. He happened to be on duty as equerry during George I’s first-ever visit to Kensington and ‘walked all over the gardens with him, and after all over the lodgings, both which he lik’t very well’.
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Courtiers enjoying themselves by the Round Pond to the east of Kensington Palace in 1736

 

Despite his setbacks, Wentworth was obviously still very close to the king on a regular basis, which gave him daily the chance to shine and, maybe, to rise. ‘I’ll rouse up my drowsy spirits,’ he promised himself, ‘double my diligence, & by the Grace of God am willing & ready to bustle thro’ this bad world.’
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