Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (16 page)

On the evening of 7 April 1726, the king and courtiers were gathered as usual in the Great Drawing Room at St James’s Palace. The room was alive with their chatter, ‘a sort of chit-chat, or
small
talk
’, which was unutterably trivial in its topics: the uniforms of the armies of foreign princes; the minor relations of important people; balls and masquerades.
²
As usual the crowd was alive to any breath of scandal, and anyone remotely notorious endured the customary ordeal of ‘ogling’, ‘whispering’ and ‘glancing’.
³
Everything seemed just as normal.

But a sensational event would make this drawing room the most memorable in a long while. The doors suddenly burst open to a blur of bodies, arms and legs. In came a brace of footmen, bearing between them a curly-headed boy. He was perhaps twelve years old.

He had a friendly grin, but there was something decidedly odd about this youth. In the first place, he seemed not the least ‘embarrassed at finding himself in the midst of such a fashionable assembly’.
⁴
Once lowered to the drawing-room floor, he crouched down and scuttled about using his arms, like a chimp. And instead of bowing and scraping to the Lord Chamberlain and taking his place in the circle, the young man boldly scampered straight up to the king.

The courtiers were scandalised by his audacious lack of ceremony.

This was their first encounter with Peter, the curious ‘Wild Boy’ of the woods, a feral child. Peter was a captivating character, green-eyed and with a peculiarly bushy brush of dark brown hair; he had ‘very good strong teeth’ and was prone to bouts of irrepressible laughter.
⁵
In stark contrast to the fops of the drawing room, Peter preferred to go about naked, had no table manners and did not understand the use of a bed.
⁶
Strangest of all, he could speak neither English nor German. In fact, the Wild Boy had absolutely no language at all.

A toy boy for the ladies of the court? Poor Peter, the wild child found in the woods

 

Now, showing great indulgence, the old king began to play with his new toy. He relished Peter’s refreshing lack of familiarity with the drawing-room world. The courtiers watched, fascinated, as Peter first encountered the fabric of their everyday lives. Princess Caroline encouraged him to try on her glove, and then let him examine ‘the sparkling gems’ on her black velvet gown. Everyone shared Peter’s delight when he discovered her ‘gold watch that struck the hours’, which ‘was held to strike at his ear’.
⁷

Peter was about as far removed from the other courtiers – in background, in behaviour – as could be possible. He provided amusement for everybody with his comical ways. But his presence also sparked off engrossing philosophical debates, the kind of clever conversations that all courtiers enjoyed from time to time.
The occasional intellectual dispute signalled that the British court was sophisticated and superior, a heavyweight contender among the courts of Enlightenment Europe.

Peter’s very existence raised the fascinating question of what it really meant to be human.

*

For Peter, the drawing room at St James’s Palace marked the end of a strange odyssey that had begun in a German forest.

At George I’s insistence, his court decamped to his birthplace in Hanover every other year for a few carefree weeks of vacation. He summered in the palace of Herrenhausen outside the city, surrounded by its gardens, canals and orange trees. Here, after years of endeavour, the king’s engineers had finally persuaded Europe’s tallest fountain to play. It spurted a joyous thirty-six metres into the air. Here, too, his gardeners in 1726 were planting the arrow-straight avenue that linked the palace to the city of Hanover with a staggering 1,219 new lime trees.

The king was so proud of his gardens at Herrenhausen that he even let tourists enjoy them too in his absence, just as long as they didn’t disturb the nightingales or throw things at the swans.
⁸

Peter the Wild Boy also grew up near Hanover, but his childhood was spent deep in the adjacent wild wood of Hertswold.
⁹
His family and early years remain muffled in mystery, and people speculated that he’d been suckled by a she-wolf. One day in 1725, local forest folk found Peter wandering all alone among the trees. A newspaper described how they’d discovered ‘a creature of a real human kind and species, naked and wild’. It seemed that Peter had had no human contact since his infancy, and only his height suggested that he was ‘about 12 or 13 years of age’.
¹⁰
And he had no words to tell his own story: it was ‘not yet known by what strange fate he came into the wood, because he cannot speak’.
¹¹

There was a general assumption that the Wild Boy had been ‘rescued’ from the wilderness, but the more detailed accounts of his capture reveal that he was actually hunted down like a wild beast. ‘When he was first discovered,’ claimed one of many
newspaper articles, he was ‘so wild and savage, as to shun all human kind’, and he could ‘climb up the trees with an agility scarce to be considered’.
¹²
One report described him ‘walking on all fours, running up trees like a squirrel, and feeding upon grass and moss’.
¹³
Perhaps, as another excited journalist claimed, he was first spotted ‘sitting in the hollow of a tree cracking nuts and eating acorns’.
¹⁴
(As we shall see, acorns would retain a special significance for Peter.)

He did not leave his freedom readily. As his hunters closed in, Peter tried to hide at the top of a tree, and it had to be felled before he could be captured.
¹⁵
Once ensnared, Peter was taken to the town of Celle, where he was thrust with the vagabonds and criminals into the ‘House of Correction’.
¹⁶

News of Peter and his bizarre, speechless condition rippled out in ever wider circles, and in time reached Herrenhausen and the ears of George I. The king ordered Peter to be brought from the prison to the palace. He took a fancy to the Wild Boy, and decided to make him a member of his household. The king already had Turkish valets, a Polish dwarf entertainer and a menagerie full of rare beasts. This savage half-human from Hanover would strike a further pleasingly exotic note.

As the royal household began its long journey back across the German states to return to London, it would have been hard to imagine a greater transformation in Peter’s lifestyle. People thought that the Wild Boy was ‘more of the Ouran Outang species than of the human’.
¹⁷
Many of the other rare creatures previously obtained for the British royal menagerie had died from well-intentioned but misguided treatment: an elephant perished from drinking a gallon of wine a day, and ostriches were fed nails under the mistaken idea that they could digest iron.

How would the puckish Peter adapt to a new life in captivity?

*

Back in the drawing room, the courtiers tried to coach and coax Peter into producing a few halting words. ‘What is your name?’ they asked. He could be drilled into saying ‘Pe–ter’ in reply, but he
would always pronounce the two syllables of his name with a short interval between them. ‘Who is your father?’ they asked, and the answer they expected was ‘King George’.
¹⁸

At first glance, Peter looked like any other boy, although his hair grew ‘lower on his forehead than is common’.
¹⁹
Although he went about on his hands and knees, his body was ‘strait and upright, & not hairy’. The most observant noticed that the middle and fourth fingers of his left hand bore the traces of a poorly healed wound, being ‘web’d together like a duck’s foot’. This was a souvenir from his solitary struggle for survival in the woods. People were particularly struck by his demeanour, which wasn’t solemn and stately like the other courtiers: he had ‘a roving look’ in his eyes, and ‘a merry disposition’.
²⁰

Although the courtiers found Peter endlessly fascinating, it was not planned that he should linger long at the king’s court. Princess Caroline ‘loved to see odd persons’, and she had taken a great and instant fancy to the Wild Boy. Now, to please her, the king generously told her that he would present her with Peter as a gift.
²¹

But it seems that George I was reluctant to keep his promise. Peter’s transfer to Princess Caroline’s household was several times delayed because ‘the King and court were so entertained with him’ and could not bear to give him up.
²²

A polite tug of war now began, with the Wild Boy at its centre. On one level he was just a damaged child. On another, he had become a commodity: as a subject for speculation and brainy showing-off, he was a valuable and status-enhancing curiosity.

Both George I and Princess Caroline wanted Peter, and he became yet another symbol of the rivalry between the two courts.

*

The king’s household, headed by a reserved but kindly master, seemed at first to be no bad place for Peter to remain. We have a glimpse of George I as he now was, in old age, through the eyes of another child. The ten-year-old Horace Walpole, Sir Robert’s son, was taken by his mother to see the king. He recollected George I as ‘an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his
pictures and coins; not tall’. He wore ‘a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband over all’.
²³
Horace also passed juvenile judgement upon the king’s mistress Melusine: she was ‘a very tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady’.
²⁴

Even at the age of sixty-five, George I’s hair was still a rich dark brown and only lightly peppered with white. (This same year, 1726, he gave a lock of hair to a courtier-in-waiting at Kensington Palace: wrapped up in a piece of paper, it remains today in the Manuscripts Room of the British Library.
²⁵
) But his health was declining. Three years ago he had suffered a stroke, collapsing to the floor, where he ‘remained senseless for a full hour’, ‘his wig on one side, and his hat on the other’.
²⁶
He made what appeared to be a full recovery afterwards.

The king had absorbed many more of the customs and attitudes of his British subjects during the twelve years he had now spent on the throne, and his language skills had improved. Even so, a well-worn joke circulated that Sir Robert Walpole, weak in George I’s preferred German or French, had brushed up on the Roman classics in order to converse with the king.

Walpole was surely exaggerating when he claimed to have ‘governed the kingdom by the means of bad Latin’, but he did indeed have an interpreter present during his meetings with the king, and George I’s linguistic limitations remained very trying to his household.
²⁷

It was considered essential that the Lutheran-born king should support the Anglican Church, but he found the weekly services a particular trial. One story goes that he’d developed a habit of chatting with the German-speaking Dr Younger, Dean of Salisbury, during the sermons in the Chapel Royal, which were incomprehensible and boring to him. This was thought ‘indecorous’ and ‘excited much offence’. The solution hit upon was to ban the dean from the palace and to inform the king that he’d been killed by an accidental kick from a horse. George I was deeply affected by the news. Many years later, to his amazement, he
encountered Dr Younger still alive and well and living in Salisbury.
²⁸

Despite his continued image problems, George I had nevertheless begun to win some quiet appreciation for his consistent and solid work as sovereign. His hard graft at the business side of kingship, if not at its showmanship, had gained him respect if not popularity.
²⁹
The chattering classes generally accepted that his abilities were not brilliant, but ‘no man will presume to say they were contemptible’.
³⁰
People were beginning to learn that his reserve stemmed not from pride, but from ‘modesty, caution and deliberation’. And while he may have been reserved in company, Mustapha and Mohammed knew that there was nobody ‘more free among his nearest servants’.
³¹