Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (4 page)

Prince George Augustus had bulging, bright-blue eyes

 

On 25 April 1720, a special sense of anticipation was building in the fashionable parts of London. The party planned at St James’s Palace that night was the most hotly anticipated court occasion for many years.

Nowhere was the excitement greater than in the rambling old mansion called Leicester House. This building, dominating the north side of Leicester Fields, was the home of the king’s son and daughter-in-law, the Prince and Princess of Wales, George Augustus (1683–1760) and Caroline (1683–1737). While the prince and princess were losing their looks and fast approaching middle age, they remained a jovial, lively and friendly couple.

Tonight’s entertainment, though, would sorely strain their good
spirits. They were going to have to pay a reluctant visit to the court of King George I (1660–1727).

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The late afternoon saw Prince George Augustus berating a clumsy servant as he struggled into an outfit of peacock splendour. He aimed to be ‘always richly dressed, being fond of fine clothes’.
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Bad-tempered, full of bluster, fond of music and of fighting, this prince would become best known as George II, the last British king to lead troops in person upon the battlefield. He struts through Britain’s history books like a kind of tin-pot dictator: brusque, pompous and a little bit ludicrous. Despite his tantrums, though, he deserves at least a pinch of sympathy. Like all courtiers, he spent his days performing a part upon a stage.

Unfortunately, for a man of his gaudy tastes, he was considerably shorter than average.
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He had bulging china-blue eyes and his prominent nose was rather Roman.
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He also had an imperious temper: ‘vehement, and irritable’, ‘hot, passionate, haughty’.
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But his anger could cool as quickly as it came. He had the great redeeming feature of being passionately in love with his wife, the fat, funny and adorable Princess Caroline. He would rely upon her for the strength and steadiness to face the difficult evening that lay ahead.

She, meanwhile, was growing flustered as the Women of her Bedchamber tried to lace up her stiff stays.

Plump, yet pin-sharp, Princess Caroline had a sweet smile, and blossomed into beauty when her face and mouth were in motion. Wilhelmine Karoline of Ansbach, as she was born, had been celebrated in her youth as the ‘most agreeable Princess in Germany’.
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Her arms were admired for their ‘whiteness and elegance’; she had ‘a penetrating eye’ and an ‘expressive countenance’. Princess Caroline could split sides with her amusing impressions, loved a quick-fire duel of wit and spoke English ‘uncommonly well for one born outside England’.
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Friend of the philosophers Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton, she would in due course become the cleverest queen consort ever to sit upon the throne of England.

Princess Caroline: fat, funny and adorable

 

With her greater intellectual skills, humour and sense of style, Princess Caroline would have made a far more successful heir to the crown than her husband, but the odds for opportunity were always stacked against eighteenth-century women. Caroline kept her husband subtly but firmly under her thumb, and always contrived ‘that her opinion should appear as if it had been his own’.
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In spite of Princess Caroline’s infectious laughter and her cleverness, and despite Prince George Augustus’s visibly lavish love for his wife, he inflicted a regular humiliation upon her: he was carrying on an affair with one of Caroline’s servants, and future conflict was inevitable.

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At the time of his birth in 1683, the possibility that George Augustus would become Prince of Wales had seemed almost preposterously small. Both he and Caroline came from dinky little principalities that now form part of modern Germany. They’d only immigrated to Britain in 1714, when George Augustus’s father, later King George I, had unexpectedly inherited the British throne because of the accidental failure of the Stuart line of monarchs.

Britain’s previous queen, Anne, had endured seventeen
pregnancies in a desperate but ultimately futile attempt to squeeze out an heir. Her failure to produce a healthy child brought the Stuart line to a stuttering stop, with the exception of her Catholic half-brother. Anne’s elder sister, Mary, had deposed their father James II in 1688 because of his despotic and Catholic regime. This was the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’.

The choice faced at Anne’s death, then, was either to recall James II’s Catholic offspring or to look back up the trunk of the Stuart family tree to identify a Protestant branch.

The Act of Settlement of 1701 tidied up the problem. It specified that the small, Protestant house of Hanover should provide Anne’s successors. This was to be at the expense of the exclusion of fifty nearer relatives, who were regrettably but unacceptably Catholic.

Upon Anne’s death in 1714, the Hanoverian succession unfolded surprisingly smoothly, and the small, provincial court of Hanover crossed the Channel to London. The Electoral Prince, Georg Ludwig of Hanover, became King George I of Great Britain, while his son and daughter-in-law became Prince and Princess of Wales.

But the great transformation in their fortunes in 1714 was the beginning, not the end, of this family’s troubles.

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All across London, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s courtiers and supporters were likewise preening and squeezing themselves into their court clothes. As the sun sank, each of the ladies was reaching the end of a toilette that had taken two hours or more. ‘Lud! Will you never have done fumbling?’ grumbled many a modern lady to her maid.
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Once her figure had been transformed into the right shape by tight stays and a hooped petticoat, a female courtier was required to put on her court uniform. The ‘mantua’, as it was known, was an archaic, uncomfortable but supremely elegant form of dress. Pale forearms descended from wing-cuff sleeves with the requisite three rows of ruffles (‘I am so incommoded with these nasty ruffles!’
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).
Long trains spilt at the back from tightly seamed waists. The mantua’s skirts were spread out sideways over immensely wide hoops, too broad to pass through a door. ‘Have you got the whalebone petticoats among you yet?’ Jonathan Swift wrote from court. ‘A woman here may hide a moderate gallant under them.’
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Any female courtier would be altogether unrecognisable without her warpaint, ‘pale, dead, old and yellow’.
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So maids were busily painting their mistresses with ‘rosy cheeks, snowy foreheads and bosoms, jet eyebrows and scarlet lips’, and puffing powder over piled coiffures. Once trussed up and coloured, the female courtiers resembled the beauties in Mrs Salmon’s famous London gallery of waxworks, and had carefully to avoid the fire for fear ‘of melting’.
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Meanwhile, the male courtiers were donning coat, waistcoat and breeches encrusted with embroidery. Their shoe buckles were jewelled, and each would rest a hand upon the hilt of a sword. On their heads, the itchy and sweaty full-bottomed periwig was still in fashion. Between each gentleman’s left elbow and his side was clenched his
chapeau-bras
: a flat, unwearable parody of a hat, for the head was never covered in the presence of the king.

‘Dress is a very foolish thing,’ declared the arch-courtier Lord Chesterfield, and yet, at the same time, ‘it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed’.
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Two junior members of Princess Caroline’s household at Leicester Fields were preparing with particular care, because they and their colleagues would be the subject of intense and critical scrutiny on this special evening.

Mrs Henrietta Howard was one of the six Women of Princess Caroline’s Bedchamber. The Princess’s most senior servants were the Ladies of the Bedchamber, peeresses one and all. The Women of the Bedchamber, slightly lower down the social scale but still well-born, did the real work of dressing and undressing, watching and waiting. But Henrietta had both an official and an unofficial job. As well as being Princess Caroline’s servant, she was also the 
recognised mistress of Caroline’s husband. Neither role brought her much pleasure.

Henrietta Howard. She had a ‘romantick turn of mind’, an ‘air of sadness’ – and an alcoholic bully for a husband

 

Now in her thirty-first year, Henrietta was not an astounding beauty. Yet her build was slim, she had ‘the finest light brown hair’ and she was ‘always well dressed with taste and simplicity’.
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(This ‘beautiful head of hair’ had played a small but significant role in her life story so far.
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) Unlike many royal mistresses, she had not exploited her position to amass influence and riches. She was of a ‘romantick turn of mind’, thoughtful, gentle, but ‘close as a cork’d bottle’.
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Her friend, the poet Alexander Pope, accused her of ‘not loving herself so well as she does her friends’, and he also described a grievous ‘air of sadness about her’.
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No wonder, for her life had been difficult. She was now living apart from her brutal, heavy-drinking husband. Orphaned at a young age and looking for security, marriage had looked like a safe option. But marrying Charles Howard had turned out to be a terrible mistake.

And she had very little hold on the affections of the other problematic partner in her life, her royal lover. Prince George Augustus
rather reluctantly felt that it would be beneath his princely dignity to remain faithful to his wife, and he had a mistress only out of a sense that he ought to. So he was often cruel and abrupt with Henrietta.

She, too, was dreading the palace drawing room. Despite her privileged position as royal mistress, for her it held the risk of an unpleasant encounter with the husband who’d given her nothing but unhappiness, bruises and destitution.

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By sharp contrast, Henrietta’s junior colleague in the royal household, Molly Lepell, was dancing round her dressing room in delight. She was one of the merry Maids of Honour, a good-looking and audacious gang of girls whose job was to decorate and animate Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline’s court.

Born in the very first year of the eighteenth century, the now nineteen-year-old Molly was nicknamed ‘The
Schatz
’, German for ‘treasure’. Part of her charm was her bottomless fund of jokes. She even mockingly (and wrongly) disparaged her own looks. ‘I am little,’ she said, but at least ‘there are many less’. ‘I am strait, the shoulders low … the neck long, the throat frightful, the head too large, the face flat … as to my hair it has nothing to make it tolerable, it grows badly, not thick, and of a pale and ugly brown’.
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