Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (30 page)

Next Caroline’s hairdresser, Mrs Purcell, would spread a short muslin cape over the queen’s shoulders to protect her dress while her hair was arranged into a high bun. Once a conical ‘powder mask’ had been placed over Caroline’s face, her tight curls were ‘clotted all over’ with white particles.
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Hairdressing was not terribly hygienic, and a Georgian lady could find her head being patted with ‘a paste of composition rare/ sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair’.
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Next one of Caroline’s ‘heads’ or ‘hoods’ of gauze or lace from France or Brussels would be settled over her hair; these were among the most expensive items in her wardrobe.
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During these closing stages of the toilette, George II would sometimes come in and criticise Henrietta’s work, snatching off the handkerchief from round Caroline’s shoulders and crying, ‘because you have an ugly neck yourself, you love to hide the Queen’s!’
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Finally, painting the face was a necessity for most courtiers, men as well as women. Rouged cheeks were daringly fashionable: as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it, ‘falsehood, like red on the face, should be used very seldom and very sparingly’.
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A cut and wet red ribbon sometimes did the trick. Caroline wore few cosmetics, although she did favour ‘patches’ (she purchased six ‘papers’ of patches in 1733, for example) to cover her smallpox scars.
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Unfortunately for Henrietta, Dr Arbuthnot’s researches confirmed that the Bedchamber Woman certainly was required to hold the basin, and that it was indeed her duty to pour ‘the water out of the ewer upon the Queen’s hands’.
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Once precedent had spoken in this dispute over etiquette, Caroline had no hesitation in reminding Henrietta that she was powerless. She first showed the velvet glove: ‘I told her I knew we should be good friends again.’ But then she gave a glimpse of the iron fist beneath, reminding Henrietta ‘that it was in my power, if
I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop through my fingers – thus –’
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The querulous queen, now nearly fifty, was not easy to dress elegantly, for her figure was decidedly overripe. Some people even called her the king’s ‘great fat-arsed wife’.
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Henrietta, at forty-five, had retained her charms rather more effectively. She dyed her hair blonde, and could still make Lord Peterborough, for one, tremble with lust: ‘When she comes in my way – the motion, the pain/The leapings, the achings, return all again.’
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Despite her formidable powers of attraction, Henrietta was suffering from various health problems, including dreadful headaches and a hearing impairment. She had ‘a most intolerable pain in one side of her head’, while an operation upon her jaw caused ‘many weeks misery’.
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In 1731, though, had come a great stroke of luck which enabled her to begin to consider a plan for escape. Even after separating from her husband, she’d remained close to his much more respectable brother, the Earl of Suffolk. The earl died on 22 June of that year. Having had no intention of letting his wastrel younger brother Charles inherit and squander his money, he left a considerable sum to his sister-in-law Henrietta instead.

His death also meant that she became the Countess of Suffolk. At first Henrietta was rather embarrassed by all the bowing and scraping that she now received, and commanded her friend John Gay to stop calling her ‘Your Ladyship’ under threat of being sent supperless to bed.
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However, it was impossible that a peeress should remain in the menial position of Bedchamber Woman, and promotion for Henrietta was inevitable.

It was also inevitable that Henrietta’s husband Charles would challenge his brother’s will. Disgusted by Charles’s nastiness, though, the old Earl of Suffolk had sewn up his estate so cleverly that Henrietta received her money intact. Indeed, Charles himself had only a couple of years more to live.

Henrietta, now Lady Suffolk, bargained carefully for her new
job in the royal household. People reported that she ‘was offered to be Lady of the Bedchamber, which she declined’.
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She held out for a more important post, Mistress of the Robes, and on 29 June 1731 she told John Gay that she had finally ‘kiss’d hands’ for her new place.
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Now her duties would be far lighter: in fact, her only task was ‘to give the Queen her jewels’. Her salary remained the same, because previously she’d received an extra hundred pounds a year on top of a Bedchamber Woman’s salary ‘for buying the Queen’s clothes’.
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The lifting of the burden of constant service elated Henrietta. As she enthused to John Gay, her new situation promised ‘more happiness for the latter part of [her] life than [she’d] yet had a prospect of’. ‘My time is become very much my own,’ she wrote. And the money she had inherited would enable Henrietta to enjoy herself.

She had ‘at this time a great deal of business’ upon her hands, not from her court job, but from a much more pleasurable project. She was supervising the building of a little house for herself by the Thames west of London, at Marble Hill.
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She’d purchased the site in 1724, and three years later she’d obtained and been greatly influenced by William Kent’s architectural book,
The Designs of Inigo Jones
. Nothing made her happier than inspecting the workmen’s progress upon her proposed Palladian villa. Peter Wentworth thought Henrietta’s good fortune had even ameliorated her deafness: ‘she’s so well pleased that she hears better already’.
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So Henrietta now blossomed. The summer of 1734 saw her taking advantage of something that she’d never previously experienced: a holiday. She favoured the resort of Bath with her presence for six weeks. Because no one could remember Henrietta ever leaving the court before, it caused a sensation, and ‘occasion’d as much speculation in the family at Kensington as the removal of two or three minor Ministers would have done’.
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But when she returned in October from her jaunt in the pump rooms and ballrooms of Bath, Henrietta found George II even
less eager than before to share her company. Suspecting her of having consorted in Bath with his political enemies, he cut her dead in the drawing room. And that ‘the King went no more in an evening to Lady Suffolk was whispered about the court by all that belonged to it’.
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To enter the royal household was difficult, but to leave it contrary to royal will was even harder. Henrietta had first sought to quit the court nearly ten years previously, but she’d been forbidden from doing so.

Now, armed with what she thought was clear and incontrovertible evidence of the king’s disapproval, she sought a resignation interview with Caroline. She found herself in possession of ‘above an hour and a half alone’ with the queen in the bedchamber where so many of their previous showdowns had taken place.
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The conversation was so painful and so important to Henrietta that after it was over she wrote it down. At first Caroline claimed that she hadn’t noticed Henrietta’s cold reception since her return from Bath: ‘You surprise me. What do you mean? I don’t believe ye King is angry … Child, you dream.’

And she refused to listen to Henrietta’s complaints of court intrigue and the king’s coldness: ‘Come, my dear Lady Suffolk, you are very warm, but believe me I am your friend, your best friend. You don’t know a court. It’s not proper of me to say this, but indeed you don’t know a court.’ She told Henrietta not to mind court gossip, and reminded her how cold the world would seem outside the court bubble.

But now Henrietta showed that she still had her integrity hidden away beneath her courtier’s shell, and she insisted that she wanted to leave. ‘Some people may shew me it was ye courtier and not me that was liked,’ she replied. ‘I can’t say that to keep such an acquaintance will be any argument for me to stay at court.’

When the queen perceived that her scoffing was having no effect, she was forced to try a different tack to persuade Henrietta to stay: ‘For God’s sake consider your character! You leave me
because the King will not be more particular to you than the others?’
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Defeated at last, though, by Henrietta’s solid opposition in this game of verbal chess, Caroline could only play for time.

‘Oh fie, Lady Suffolk, upon my word,’ she expostulated. The idea of resignation was only ‘a very fine notion’ out of a novel. ‘Pray consider, be calm,’ the queen implored. ‘Stay a week longer, won’t you stay this week at my request?’
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Having won this week’s grace, Caroline tried to have her husband the king prevent her meekest, mildest and most useful servant from leaving court. By now, though, he was as anxious to let Henrietta go as she was herself to depart. ‘What the devil did you mean by trying to make an old, dull, deaf, peevish beast stay and plague me when I had so good an opportunity for getting rid of her?’ was one account of what he shouted at his wife.
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Another account – less dramatic but no less nasty – reported that his words were: ‘I don’t know why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary.’
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Henrietta ended their long relationship with a grace that was in a different realm altogether, conceding in a letter to him that ‘the years to come must be employ’d in the painful task to forget you as my friend; but no years can ever make me forget you as my King’.
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The truth of her statement would indeed be tested, decades later.

Having served her week’s notice, Henrietta ‘had another audience, complained again of her unkind treatment from the King, was very civil to the Queen, and went that night to her brother’s house in St James’s Square’.
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So it turned out that when the king, queen and all their servants had vacated Kensington Palace at the end of the summer, Henrietta had been leaving it for the last time ever. On 22 November, amid wonder, disbelief and shock, she departed from St James’s en route for her newly built villa by the river Thames at Marble Hill and for a private life.

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Henrietta’s departure also signalled the breaking up of the cheerful, prank-prone band of the Maids of Honour, although many of them had by now married. (‘We wild girls always make your prudent wives and mothers,’ laughed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
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)

Some Maids of Honour, though, were less lucky or wise. Miss Anne Vane was described as ‘a maid of honour who was willing to cease to be so upon the first opportunity’, while aspirant Maid of Honour Peggy Bradshaw boasted in correspondence to Henrietta that the king ‘I daresay will like me for my boobies are mightily grown’.
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Peggy also had in hand a gentleman worth
£
300 per year who fancied her ‘extremely’, but unfortunately he was engaged to someone else. ‘I live in hope’, she concludes, ‘that a loose man may come.’
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Illegitimate children were far from unknown at St James’s Palace, and the Maids of Honour often seemed to have insider knowledge about their origins. For example, the chapel archives record the evening baptism of ‘a female child about four weeks old’ that was mysteriously ‘dropped in the court’. Two of the Maids of Honour, Miss Tyron and Miss Meadows, were roped in ‘to stand as godmothers’.

Margaret Cuyler, who grew up to be a courtesan and actress, claimed in later life to be the daughter of an unnamed Maid of Honour and to have played with the royal children. Her assertion rings true because she always seems to have been welcome at court despite her dubious reputation and promiscuous life.
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Even the wise Molly Hervey, on one occasion before her marriage, was ‘drawn into a fine scrape’ and had to seek Dr Arbuthnot’s help: ‘what I am to do in the matter God knows, not I. [I] beg your advice in it.’
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What this ‘scrape’ was and what medical advice was offered remain mysterious but guessable.

But not everyone got away with ‘dropping’ a child. While Henrietta negotiated a smooth exit from the court, others were brutally expelled: Maid of Honour Sophy Howe, for example, was crushed like a butterfly after her seduction and abandonment by Lord Lonsdale’s brother ‘Nunty’.

Sophy’s high spirits had always brought her into conflict with the restrictions round court life, and her crush on Nunty Lowther encouraged her to kick over the traces altogether. She ran away from the palace ‘dressed in men’s shoes and breeches’ and made her way to Lowther’s house in town. Here her so-called lover – ‘who she is in love with, and by the way, the town says she is with child by’ – escaped through the back door, while his conniving porter detained Sophy on the front step. The authorities ‘were forced to send to her mother and friends, and they have confined her’.
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