Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (11 page)

If you climb the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace today, you’ll see painted figures looking down upon you from the walls. There are valets, porters, maids, pages, guards, musicians, babies and lapdogs. They whisper, glance, fan themselves, climb upon the balustrade … everyone is in motion, and everyone is watching you.

This masterpiece of mural art was commissioned by George I in a concerted effort to transform his run-down palace at Kensington and to make his court more splendid and welcoming than that of his gregarious son and daughter-in-law. The smiling faces watching and welcoming you are portraits of real servants of the king, drafted in to do the duty of making the palace buzz and bustle.

It’s a remarkable collection of portraits, celebrating a rank in society from which individuals are rarely remembered. But it was nearly never painted at all. It took luck as well as a liberal dash of talent for an outsider, William Kent, to win the job of populating the king’s staircase with characters from his court.

In 1722, the twists and turns of this particular artistic commission coalesced into a cut-throat, all-out battle that divided artistic London.

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William Kent was a rumbustious, gluttonous, outrageous character. Throughout the royal family’s quarrel he had been studying painting in Italy. When he returned to London at the end of 1719, just before the royal reconciliation at St James’s, he found only a rainy English winter and a chilly welcome. The days were so short, he complained, and so ‘cold to an Italian constitution’ that
he kept to his ‘little room’. He consoled himself by going twice a week to the opera, where he was ‘highly entertain’d’ and able to imagine himself ‘out of this Gothick country’.
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William Kent, ‘very hot, & very fat’, at work with his pen

 

Because of his adopted Italian ways, Kent’s numerous friends called him ‘The Signior’. His bosom buddy and patron, Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington and fourth Earl of Cork (1695–1753), addressed him, affectionately, as ‘Kentino’ (‘little Kent’).

The ‘little room’ that Kent used as his London bolthole was in Burlington’s grand Piccadilly home. The two had first met in Italy in 1716, and Kent’s fiery personality was the perfect foil to Burlington’s considered coolness. Kent was given unique licence to tease: in one of his sketches of the earl, a dog urinates upon the aristocratic ankle. The odd couple nevertheless had many common interests, particularly as Burlington was enormously enthusiastic about architecture and design. Indeed, some people
considered that he took his interests far too seriously for an aristocrat, and ‘lessened himself’ by getting too technical.
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So the scientific Burlington and the artistic Kent lived on the most amicable terms, together pouring scorn upon Kent’s rival artists with ‘mortification – and mirth’.
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Kent wrote in one letter to his patron of their ‘living and loving together, as you and I do’, and concluded another with ‘a hundred more wild things that cannot be write’.
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Kent needed wildness, wine and sunshine to be happy. His friends teased him for his dictatorial manner about the best way to cook a steak; for entertaining himself ‘with syllabubs and damsels’; for being in love with malt liquor; for being ‘very hot, & very fat’.
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At one select party held in his little room, fourteen bottles of wine were drunk ‘in one sitting’.
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Always volatile, Kent could be touchy and ‘very umbrageous in his drink’.
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Yet he also possessed the talent and immense self-confidence that could catapult him into court circles.

As an extrovert, disingenuous character, Kent would find the court a complicated and confusing place to work. Court politics spilt over into all parts of palace life, including the remoter reaches of the Office of the King’s Works. It was only through a remarkable fluke that the unkempt Kent found himself in possession of a plum royal commission, and his enemies would do their best to take it from him.

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The battle of the painters had begun long before Kent’s return from Italy. The opening salvo had been fired not by the king, but by Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline, with the help of their chosen artist, Sir James Thornhill.
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In 1716, Caroline had redecorated her apartment at Hampton Court Palace. Like Kensington, Hampton Court was another of the summer residences to which the Hanoverian royal family had become entitled in 1714. (Caroline, with her German accent, pronounced it ‘Hamthancour’.
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) When the king went off to Hanover for the summer, Princess Caroline and Prince George Augustus
took advantage of his absence to host a series of sparkling parties at the palace. Caroline’s suite there provided a particularly magnificent setting, for it had been decorated by Britain’s greatest baroque painter, Sir James Thornhill.

Thornhill was becoming the definitive artist of the early eighteenth-century. His work on Princess Caroline’s apartment at Hampton Court was preceded by the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval Hospital, Greenwich, and would be followed by the decoration of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. He’d faced stiff competition for the job at Hampton Court from Italian painters such as Sebastiano Ricci, and indeed continental artists had been snapping up most of the best recent commissions in England. Thornhill himself had studied under the partially sighted Italian Antonio Verrio. When he’d worked at Hampton Court previously, for Queen Anne, it had been as Verrio’s assistant.

His compatriots were proud when Thornhill won the commission for Princess Caroline’s bedchamber. Lord Halifax, first Lord of the Treasury, gushed generously that ‘Mr Thornhill our countryman has strove against all oppositions & difficulties & now has got near the very top of the mountain’.
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Thornhill now demonstrated that the English could indeed do ‘history painting’ – showing mythical events on a dramatically grand scale – just as well as the Italians. On his ceiling for Princess Caroline, a Babylonian princess attempts to stop Apollo from driving his golden sun-chariot out of the sea so as not to disturb the sleepers (or lovers) below. Round the edge Thornhill placed portraits of Princess Caroline and Prince George Augustus themselves. When the couple lay together in Caroline’s brand-new crimson damask bed, they could look up and admire their own faces.

James Thornhill had undoubtedly climbed to the summit of his profession, but he’d always been a bit too pleased with himself to be a truly likeable character. He was a man fond of his own dignity, jowly and fleshy, with beetling eyebrows. In a self-portrait, he’s being slowly strangled by his own tight cravat as he glances
rather glumly from his canvas. When he was honoured with a knighthood in 1720, he bought back his family’s lost ancestral estate of Thornhill in Dorset. There he painted another self-portrait upon his drawing-room ceiling so that he, too, could easily gaze with satisfaction at his own smug countenance.
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Thornhill’s work for Princess Caroline was much admired. When it was complete, she and her husband held a memorable season for the junior court in this romantic palace down by the river. Everybody had fun at their amusing crowded balls and masquerades, so much so that ‘some virgins conceived’.
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Meanwhile, George I’s lacklustre court was constantly criticised in the newspapers, and his mistress and half-sister written off as ‘
whores
, nay, what is more
vexatious, ugly old whores
!’
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The king had much to achieve before his own court could outclass his son’s in splendour and popularity.

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In June 1716, while Prince George Augustus and Princess Caroline were living the high life at Hampton Court, a survey revealed the desperately poor condition of Kensington Palace. The king’s summer residence there was veering towards the dangerous.

The rural royal retreat at Kensington was an old-fashioned mansion created in the 1690s by the Dutch King William III and his English wife Mary II. Kensington’s great advantage lay in its air. Clean and dry by comparison with the damp old palace of St James’s, it was said to ‘cure without medicines’.
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Its healthy properties had driven the asthmatic King William III to select Kensington as one of his principal homes. There:

So the wheezing William and his wife had purchased an old seventeenth-century villa there, and set their architect, Sir Christopher Wren, to work upon expanding it. He added a pavilion to each of its four corners and created a pair of new long galleries for king and queen respectively.

These alterations became Mary’s pet project, and she drove work forward with such passion and speed that an imperfect mortar mix was overlooked and a workman killed. William and Mary’s court followed their king and queen to this newly fashionable suburb, and within fifteen years Kensington village had grown to three times the size of Chelsea and was ‘fill’d with persons of honour and distinction’.
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It was only six years after becoming queen, though, that Mary received the equivalent of a death sentence. Waking up at Kensington Palace on the morning of 21 December 1694, she discovered upon her arm the red rash preceding smallpox. The young queen, only thirty-two and radiantly beautiful, was ‘suddenly become a frightful spectacle’, and the country was devastated when the ‘putrid smallpox’ claimed her life at Kensington a week later.
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The palace she left behind was pleasant enough and beautifully situated among parks and gardens. But it had been built too quickly, and the poor quality of the workmanship meant it was already half falling down. By the time of George I’s accession, it had been for some years ‘much crack’t and out of repair’.
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Yet at first George I seemed quite satisfied with his inheritance. Before the outbreak of the ‘christening quarrel’, he’d done his best to minimise his public appearances. ‘The King locks himself up’, the courtiers complained, ‘and is never seen.’
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It was only when the quarrel erupted in 1717 that it became necessary for him to wage a war of hospitality in order to win back the supporters who were slipping away to the prince’s court.

The unfortunate death of his grandson at Kensington in 1718 was quickly followed by one of the busiest royal social seasons ever seen. A gentleman visiting from Virginia found ‘a great crowd’ at Kensington Palace dancing in the gardens, with fireworks to celebrate the king’s birthday in May.
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That summer, the king entertained fifty or sixty guests to dinner every night and held a ball twice a week.
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Also in 1718, at the very height of the quarrel, George I
embarked upon a grand plan to rebuild and redecorate the state apartments at Kensington. He intended to breathe new life into both his palace and his court.

All the craftsmen of London fervently hoped to become involved in this bold scheme to turn the crumbling Stuart house at Kensington into a magnificent and modern ‘Roman’ palace. To work in a royal palace would be the best commission of all.

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Repairs and improvements to the royal palaces were the responsibility of the Office of the King’s Works. This department received its income from the Treasury and spent it on all manner of building and decorating projects. But inevitably the factions and spats of the drawing room affected its decision-making.

The activities of the Office of the King’s Works were overseen by a board of five: the Surveyor-General, the Comptroller, the Master Mason, the Master Carpenter and one other. They met for weekly progress checks in their office at Scotland Yard, Westminster, crowded with ‘closets, presses &c for repositing the books, drawings & designs belonging to the several palaces’.
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Each month they received a report upon the man-hours and materials expended, and every year they enjoyed a celebratory dinner together. So far, so good, but politics complicated all their doings.