Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (42 page)

And in some sense this was still true, over thirty years later. For, despite his infidelities, his sulks and his casual cruelties, this king still loved his queen.

Indeed, when he suffered a near-drowning during a rough return from the continent in early 1737, George II’s thoughts turned immediately to Caroline. He wrote a letter showering her with ‘the warmest phrases that youthful poets could use in elegies to their mistresses’. Back on dry land after an unsettling few days, he felt never ‘more desirous than at that moment of opening his heart to her, because it had never felt warmer towards her’.

Despite his many faults, George II could write a good love letter. In competition for a woman like Caroline, who could be won with words, a literary gentleman would rather have had ‘any man in the world for a rival than the King … in the gift of writing love-letters [no] man ever surpassed him’.

Caroline was so proud of the letter written after the stormy voyage that she showed it to John Hervey and Sir Robert Walpole, with the warning: ‘do not think because I show you this that I am an old fool and vain of my person and charms’. But Hervey was not deceived and saw that really she was delighted by her husband’s continued ‘passion and tenderness’.

Now it was the writer of love letters, ‘the easiest, the most natural, the warmest’ of men, who fell in love with his wife once again as she lay sick.
⁸¹
From the first moment of her illness, he devoted himself to Caroline’s care with surprising constancy.

*

When Caroline’s illness was at last successfully diagnosed in November 1737, her doctors made a terrible mistake.

A ‘mortified’, or decayed, part of her bowel was now poking out through the wall of her stomach. The Royal Society had recently approved the surgeon Mr Stuart’s book entitled
New Discoveries
and Improvements in the most considerable Branches of Anatomy and
Surgery
, which included ‘ruptures of all kinds cured without cutting’.
⁸²
The doctors should really have pushed the bowel back inside and sewn up the hole.

Instead, they cut it off.

Her late father-in-law had been accustomed to call Caroline ‘
cette diablesse la Princesse
[that devil-woman the Princess]’, a description which hints at the steely soul hidden inside her plump exterior.
⁸³
And Caroline’s tenacity, resignation and resolution during the terrible days that followed were spectacular.

She now underwent almost daily surgery in her bed-chamber, under the knife of Dr John Ranby and his assistant, without the benefit of opium. The energetic Dr Ranby sometimes had to change his cap and waistcoat halfway through an operation because he’d soaked them in sweat.
⁸⁴
Peter Wentworth reported that Caroline bravely cracked jokes before he began work each day. ‘Before you begin let me have a full view of your comical face,’ she would say to Dr Ranby, and, while his blade went in, she’d ask: ‘what wou’d you give now that you was cutting your wife’?
⁸⁵

Dr Ranby, the son of an inn-keeper, had been a member of the Royal Society since 1724. As a surgeon, he was lower in status than a general physician, but he had perhaps more practical skills. Surgeons trained on the job for seven years, rather than attending university and winning a degree as did the socially superior branch of the medical profession. They were supposed to restrict themselves to ‘internal’ medicine only, but had branched out into treating sexually transmitted diseases as well. Their activities were closely linked to those of the barber, and were regulated by the Company of Barber-Surgeons. Surgeons usually plied their trade in shops and backrooms, working as quickly as they could on patients lashed down and often anaesthetised only with alcohol.

Physicians, on the other hand, jealously guarded their right to make expensive house visits. Poorer people had to make do instead with the advice of the apothecary in his shop full of herbal cures and the traditional symbolic stuffed alligator.

Caroline teased Dr Ranby about his wife, ‘cross old’ Jane, because in November 1737 he was seeking from her not only ‘a separation, but a divorce’.
⁸⁶
Ranby’s only son was illegitimate, but his
irregular personal life had proved no obstacle to his becoming sergeant-surgeon to the royal family.

Despite an aggressive and abrasive manner, Dr Ranby enjoyed considerable professional status. He’d published accounts of the medical oddities he had seen during post-mortems, such as a bladder containing sixty stones, a boy with an outsize spleen weighing two pounds, and a man whose swollen testicle contained four ounces of water.
⁸⁷
Tradition has it that Dr Ranby was the inspiration for the uppity surgeon in Henry Fielding’s novel
Tom
Jones
, a character who ‘was a little of a coxcomb’ but ‘nevertheless very much of a surgeon’.
⁸⁸

For his operation upon Caroline, Ranby had requested the aid of a comrade. Wise old Dr Bussier, formerly George I’s doctor and now ‘near the age of ninety’, stood near to Dr Ranby to direct him in ‘how to proceed in cutting Her Majesty’. Unfortunately this Dr Bussier ‘happened by the candle in his hand to set fire to his wig, at which the Queen bid Ranby stop awhile for he must let her laugh’. The three of them proceeded with the bleak, black humour of medical students.

The incision into the infected area of Caroline’s stomach had dramatic results. Given an outlet at last, the wound ‘cast forth so great a quantity of corruption’ that it created a horrific stench throughout the room. The doctors still did not quite understand what was going on: they thought that Caroline’s stomach contained an abscess that would grow unless removed.
⁸⁹

So they cut away at Caroline’s bowel. If the intestine had been pushed back inside and the rupture sealed up, all may have been well. Cutting the bowel, though, destroyed Caroline’s digestive system, and with it all hope of her recovery.

Even at the time her treatment was recognised to have been flawed. She’d been attended, people said, by ‘a throng of the killing profession trying their utmost skill to prolong her life in adding more torment to it’.
⁹⁰
She would not be the first, nor the last, person in eighteenth-century London to have ‘died of the
doctor
’.
⁹¹

The doctors had an arsenal of mass-produced medicines from
which to choose to ease Caroline’s pain, including Dr Ward’s Pills, Sir Walter Raleigh’s Cordial and Daffy’s Elixir and its many rivals (‘Mrs Daffy is pleased to call my
Elixir
spurious, and insinuates as if it were hazardous to the lives of men’
⁹²
). Caroline was also offered snakeroot and brandy, usquebaugh (Irish whiskey) and mint water. Of all these, mint water was the only sensible treatment for a digestive complaint, and it is still administered in cases of colic today.

But Caroline could not keep these palliatives down long enough for them to take effect, and suffered on stoically without them. In the middle of his undoubted concern for his wife, George II could still be brusque with her, asking why she bothered to eat the food that she vomited up again and irrelevantly demanding that ‘his last new ruffles’ be ‘sewed upon the shirt he was to put on that day at his public dressing’.
⁹³
Even in this great crisis, George II remained something of his pettifogging self.

*

During her illness, Caroline’s world shrank. It now consisted of only her bed-chamber overlooking the courtyard in St James’s Palace and her sumptuous bed, with its fifty separate textile components, including no fewer than five mattresses.

This little world was nevertheless still accessible to a surprising number of people. For a start, her family rallied round:

John Hervey also records the many and various people present and the jobs performed in the queen’s private apartment during normal times. John Teed, her chocolate-maker, milled the ingredients for her morning drink.
⁹⁵
Mrs Purcell, her hairdresser and laundress (‘a forward, pert, silly woman’), brought it to her. The French Lady Charlotte Roussie and the German Mrs Schütz,
Caroline’s attendants, were accustomed ‘like angry monkeys’ to chatter, ‘none guessing what’s the language or the matter’. As she was dressed at noon each day by her Women of the Bed-chamber, Caroline’s chaplains prayed in the next room. At night, after she had finished playing cards, the page of the back-stairs named Shaw snuffed out the candles, and a servant called La Behn read aloud to the queen until she fell asleep.
⁹⁶

After Caroline fell ill, members of Prince Frederick’s household repeatedly tried to inveigle their way into St James’s. Some of them almost managed to breach her bed-chamber itself, so eager were they to bring back accurate news to their master. As tension mounted, special orders were given to exclude as many people outside the immediate family as possible. Caroline constantly called her children in to give them last words of love and advice. To the Princess Louisa, for example, she said (with strange prescience): ‘Louisa, remember I die by being giddy, and obstinate in having kept my disorder a secret!’ Louisa would die of a rupture very similar to her mother’s, similarly concealed.
⁹⁷

George II answered Prince Frederick’s frequent messages of concern and requests to visit with more angry denials: ‘No, no! He shall not come and act any of his silly plays here, false, lying, cowardly, nauseous puppy.’ According to Frederick’s arch-enemy, John Hervey, Caroline gladly faced death without forgiving her son. ‘At least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed,’ he reported her to have said, ‘I shall never see that monster again.’
⁹⁸

But hints given by other, less hostile, witnesses suggest that Caroline secretly longed to be reconciled with her son and that he was often on her mind. Lord Egmont heard tell that ‘she forgave him everything he had done against her, but could not see him while he continued his favour to the King’s enemies’. Egmont’s diary for the period of Caroline’s illness also contains a milder version of George II’s response to Frederick’s request to visit: ‘The King said he took it kindly, and went to acquaint the Queen with it, leaving her to do in it as she pleased: but Her Majesty declined
it, saying
I forgive him with all my heart the injuries he has done me.
’
⁹⁹

Egmont also reported that Caroline had made a poignant plea to her husband: ‘though she did not see the Prince, we hear she desired His Majesty not to forget he was her son’.
¹⁰⁰

So the quarrel looked set to continue into the grave, with regret on both sides. Caroline ruefully warned her sixteen-year-old second son, William Augustus, to be ‘always dutiful to his father, & never to listen to anyone, who might be wicked enough to insinuate to him, that they cou’d have separate interests’.

There was more satisfaction to be found in being a good son, Caroline said, ‘than in the possession of all the empires of the world’.
¹⁰¹

*

After the operation to remove the mortified part of the queen’s intestine, the court’s spirits lifted a little. Every hope was pinned to her successfully ‘passing’ something through her digestive system, as this would demonstrate that her bowels were still in working order. Enemas were used to help the process and, encouragingly, ‘came away with some excrement’.
¹⁰²

‘I am in great hopes,’ wrote Peter Wentworth, ‘for God be praised the Queen [is] in good spirits.’
¹⁰³

For days Caroline lingered on with her bowels half in and half out, until, on Thursday 17 November, the news turned decidedly bad. Now her stomach practically exploded: ‘the Queen’s vomitings returned with as much violence as ever, and in the afternoon one of the guts burst in such a manner that all her excrement came out of the wound in her belly’. The ‘running at the wound was in such immense quantities that it went all through the quilts of the bed and flowed all over the floor’.
¹⁰⁴
Despite the news blackout, Alexander Pope somehow found out about these latest events:

Two days later, on Saturday 19 November, the end seemed near when ‘more than a chamber pot full of corruption came out of the
wound’, although Caroline also managed to sleep and to eat some chicken.
¹⁰⁶