Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (49 page)

Kent’s actress mistress, Elizabeth Butler, had by now abandoned the former royal haunt of Leicester Fields and moved to the suitably theatrical parish of Covent Garden. Like Kent, she was a self-made woman, and perhaps they were both too independent to share a single home. Elizabeth had two children, George and Elizabeth, and the supposition is that William Kent was their father.

Elizabeth had become quite entrepreneurial, leasing part of her theatre, thereby receiving part of its profits, and renting a reasonably grand house in King Street. Her finances remained a little wobbly, though, and once she was locked out of her new home for six weeks because of unpaid bills.
¹¹⁷

Although Kent had ‘long lived’ with Elizabeth on these friendly, if semi-detached, terms, he was still half searching for something better.
¹¹⁸
As he wrote to Lady Burlington, ‘I wonder when the time will come that I shall be in love?’
¹¹⁹

Kent’s latest professional accolade was to have been made
portrait-painter to the king, although capturing likenesses had never been the strongest of his skills. It seems that even the inartistic George II found the idea of being painted by Kent too much to bear, and ‘declared he would never sit to him for his picture’.
¹²⁰

*

And Peter Wentworth would never serve the king again either. Without Caroline to jolly him out of his shyness and his drinking, he had died in alcoholic penury. In one rare and beseeching letter written shortly before his death, his otherwise silent wife Juliana begged a rich contact for financial help. She explained that she was writing behind her husband’s back because if Peter were given money directly, he would immediately squander it rather than pay off their numerous creditors. ‘Therefore I desire this may be a secret from him,’ she begged, ‘tho’ what I am doing I think wholly for his service.’
¹²¹

In 1738, Wentworth had written what was probably his last-ever letter to his brother, recounting new difficulties at court: ‘I can’t imagine who puts it into your head that I fall out with people, there are many people that have unaccountably fallen out with me.’ He griped about the ‘spite and malice of the world’. Writing almost indecipherably (and presumably under the influence), he rightly predicted that he would be ‘falling soon off this terestable Glob [terrestrial Globe]’.
¹²²

At least his death was painless. He died very suddenly in his lodgings in the Royal Mews, halfway through a hand of quadrille.
¹²³

Peter Wentworth’s addictive illness had been so horrible, and his estate so squalidly indebted, that his relatives were almost relieved by his passing. His eldest son William was advised to try to stave off the many creditors pressing for payment by making ‘a voluntary declaration’ that he would ‘have nothing to do with any of his late father’s effects’.

The bereaved young man had mixed emotions: sure, ‘he had a natural feeling for the loss of a father’, but ‘own’d he lived in such daily agony of something even worse than death befalling him … ’twas a mercy it pleased God to take him’.
¹²⁴

Wentworth did bequeath his son one very valuable possession: the belief that a court life was not a good life. William Wentworth declared instead that ‘the summit of my ambition is to be easy & quiet from a long attendance as my father has had at court’.
¹²⁵

The court – the very worst environment for an uncertain, unsuccessful, oversensitive soul – had chewed up Peter Wentworth and spat him out. Only Caroline, had she lived, could have kept him going.

*

By October 1742, the court had also lost the presence of Sir Robert Walpole, though this was greatly against the wishes of the aging king. George II had tried desperately hard to retain Walpole in office as First Lord of the Treasury, but Walpole’s political enemies had at long last grown too strong to resist. In February 1742, a major upheaval had seen ‘the grand Corrupter’ depart from power after losing a general election because of the unpopular Spanish war.

This election had been the occasion of another spat between king and prince: George II had attempted to buy Prince Frederick’s support for Walpole’s precarious position by offering to add an extra
£
50,000 a year to the much-disputed allowance. Frederick’s refusal to bargain saw the king behaving like a caricature of himself, stirred by ‘great passions’ and ‘flinging off his wig’.
¹²⁶

The cash-strapped prince eventually accepted the offer of the additional annuity. In an echo of the unwilling reconciliation of 1720, he managed to appear at a levee at St James’s, and his father managed to ask him, not too impolitely, if Princess Augusta was well.
¹²⁷
This brief and stilted conversation was, in fact, a triumph of goodwill for this particular father and son.

Sir Robert Walpole’s departure from power meant a major alteration in the galaxy of political alliances. In the wake of his departure, his political acolyte John Hervey also flounced out of the royal circle in disgust. Hervey resigned from his relatively recent appointment to the government office of Privy Seal and
refused the proffered royal pension in order to demonstrate his chagrin at the loss of his boss.

Cast outside the inner circle, his health began to fail, although his vituperation against George II remained very venomous.

*

Despite the temporary turbulence caused by the departure of such significant characters, life at court from day to day chugged on monotonously. The remaining palace servants longed for a little excitement. ‘All I can say of Kensington’, wrote one weary courtier, ‘is that it is just the same as it was.’
¹²⁸

Its habitués complained that a drawing-room evening was ‘a perpetual round of hearing the same scandal, and seeing the same follies acted over and over’.
¹²⁹
The institutionalised courtier turned into a kind of machine, ‘little superior to the court clock’, telling you ‘now it is
levée
, now dinner, now supper time, & c’.
¹³⁰
Everybody was ready for some new outrage to liven things up, and they were not to be disappointed.

On the evening in the October of 1742 when matters came to a head between Amalie and Mary, card games were in progress, fans were fluttering, the silver in the ladies’ dresses was sparkling, the room was crowded with conversing courtiers and the two rival mistresses were glaring daggers at each other. At first everything seemed just as usual, but this would turn out to be a most memorable occasion.

It was later described as the night of the ‘great fracas at Kensington’.
¹³¹

The ‘
virtuous,
and
sober,
and
wise
Deloraine’ (who was really none of these things) was sitting playing cards as usual. She had the habit of playing a nightly game with the old-time German courtier Augustus Schutz, known by his circle as the ‘court booby’.
¹³²
Winning money at cards was the highest hope of pleasure during many a dreary evening in the drawing room. George II’s favourite pastime was commerce, a game which ‘must surely have played its cards excellently well, to have kept its ground so long’.
¹³³
But Amalie preferred quadrille: her court nickname was
‘Madame Vole’, from the term ‘
sans-prendre-vole
’ that was called out during the game.
¹³⁴

Mary Deloraine was probably not entirely sober on the evening of the ‘fracas’, and she was certainly vulnerable to pranksters. Now one of the princesses sought their revenge on their governess and old enemy. It was probably the audacious Amelia, who was still trapped in the role of unmarried daughter and required daily to decorate the drawing room.

When Mary rose for a moment from the card table, a royal hand silently pulled the chair out from beneath her. As she sat, she lost her seat. Her fall to the floor was ignominious, horribly public … and much to the amusement of the king.

This was the moment in which Mary realised that even the king himself was treating her with the contempt that she received from everybody else, and her self-control failed her. ‘Being provoked that her Monarch was diverted with her disgrace,’ rage boiled up in her, and she maliciously pulled the king’s seat out from under him in return.

But this was a terrible error, which compounded her humiliation. George II was famously ‘mortal in the part which touched the ground’. His haemorrhoids made his fall even more painful than hers, both to his posterior and to his dignity. It was a matter beyond joking. Now, as Horace Walpole said, George II was ‘so hurt and so angry’ that Mary Deloraine was conclusively disgraced.
¹³⁵

This small but significant incident was the sorry end of Mary’s ambition: long of waning power, her former lover now cast her out. Yes, he had taken ‘a taste of her’, but he ‘did not like that taste well enough to take any more’.
¹³⁶

In Walpole’s words, ‘her German rival remains in the sole and quiet possession of her royal Master’s other side’.
¹³⁷

*

Amalie would henceforth be recognised as the king’s unofficial partner, even to the extent of appearing alongside him, in miniature, on top of a dessert served by the Countess of Northumberland.
(This unusual compliment – a ‘clumsy apotheosis of her concubinage’ – in fact embarrassed her.
¹³⁸
)

An unusually intelligent princess, Amelia had ‘her ears shut to flattery, and her heart open to honesty’

 

The newspapers now fell silent upon the subject of Mary Deloraine’s court appearances and parties, previously so frequently chronicled, and she embarked upon a quick and quiet decline. In 1743, her and Mr Wyndham’s only son died, and a couple of months later it was reported that Mary herself lay ‘dangerously ill’ in her apartments at St James’s Palace.
¹³⁹
She was exiled to Twickenham, on the Thames, the resting place of so many discarded mistresses, ‘by the advice of the physicians, for the recovery of her health’.
¹⁴⁰

But the spell in rehab failed, and Mary expired on 9 November 1744, only two years after her drawing-room defeat.
¹⁴¹
It was almost as if she died of humiliation.

And yet, and yet, there could be no real winner in this battle of the mistresses.

The king kept the promise he made to Caroline on her deathbed: he would never replace her. Despite his promiscuity, he
longed to be faithful; despite his predatory behaviour with women, he only really wanted the one he couldn’t have.

Amalie could never quite measure up to the lost Caroline, and her triumph seemed unlikely to last for long. If the king required sex – which he did – there would always be younger, prettier women than her.

Dying when she did, in November 1744, Mary Deloraine lived just long enough to experience the opening skirmishes of the next battle of the mistresses. In a satirical pamphlet published that year, John Hervey suggested that Amalie had been once more threatened in her position as chief mistress by Viola, a dancer from France. The king had hopes that Viola would prove herself to be a ‘more vivacious companion’ than Amalie, who could ‘never pretend to excel’ in ‘
les Engagements de l’Amour
’.

So the German Amalie lost to a French dancer the power over the king that she’d possessed for ‘so many years’, despite ‘the rival beauty of the
British
ladies’ and their efforts to snatch it from her.
¹⁴²

Had she lived long enough to see it, Mary Deloraine would have been filled with spite and delight.