Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (17 page)

Injured pride, though, or perhaps a legitimate fear about the threat to his authority still prevented the king from genuinely warming to his son.

The refurbishment of the state apartments at Kensington was very nearly complete by 1726. That year brought change at the Office of the King’s Works. Just two days after Peter the Wild Boy’s first appearance in the drawing room in April came the death of the curmudgeonly Sir Thomas Hewett, former chief of the Office. He died a disappointed man at his Nottinghamshire home, his dreams of a new classical architecture unfulfilled.

William Kent’s numerous friends now used ‘great endeavours’ to get him into the office of Comptroller in the subsequent staff changes, but for once they were unsuccessful. He was made Master Carpenter instead.
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Nevertheless, this was a significant coup. In a remarkable U-turn in his fortunes since he was investigated by the committee of enquiry, the young pretender had become an Office of Works insider.

Only a few days after Peter the Wild Boy’s first appearance at St James’s, he was taken over to Kensington to sit for Kent’s staircase. Kent decided to hide the boy’s injured left hand, and in his right painted the sprig of oak and acorns that served as a reminder of Peter’s former forest life.

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Outside this microcosm of the world defined by the palace walls, a mania for the Wild Boy had taken off. Londoners now hailed him as ‘the most wonderful wonder’ and ‘one of the greatest curiosities of the world since the time of Adam’.
³³

Throughout the centuries, feral children like Peter have aroused feelings of pity, sometimes fear, and a sense of strangeness. Romulus and Remus, wolf-children, monkey-boys or the children imprisoned in kennels or cellars by twisted parents all give us a shudder of ‘the other’.

Peter could not fail to fascinate the intellectuals then exploring the questions raised by the great revolutionary upheaval in thought generally known as ‘The Enlightenment’. Philosophers were beginning to assert the primacy of reason over superstition, and to challenge the authority of the established church and nobility. They even debated the very definition of a human being, and whether or not people had souls. Peter proved to be a stimulating test case. If he possessed no speech, did he therefore possess no soul? Was he really just an animal? Or was he an admirable and ‘noble savage’ who’d lived a life untainted by society? Jonathan Swift remarked that the subject of the Wild Boy had been ‘half our talk this fortnight’, and Daniel Defoe thought he was the most interesting thing in the world.
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As a result of his wildfire celebrity, Peter the Wild Boy won the accolade of appearing as a waxwork in Mrs Salmon’s celebrated gallery. Her collection of 140 figures was to be found at the sign of the Golden Salmon in the Strand.
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Mrs Salmon was ‘famed throughout England for her skilful wax modelling’, and visitors could assess her accuracy by comparing her with her own waxwork of herself.
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Mocking the court and courtiers was already something of an obsession with certain parts of the London media, and the Wild Boy also became wonderful fodder for the city’s satirists. The capital had a vigorous and apparently unchecked popular press, within which both court and Opposition factions had their own
publications. The
London Gazette
reported respectfully on royal activities. In the course of the decade following Peter’s arrival in London, Sir Robert Walpole would spend
£
50,000 from Secret Service funds in supporting Whig-friendly newspapers.
³⁷
Meanwhile,
The Craftsman
was full of anonymous rants by Opposition politicians, and there were many other occasional publications and pamphlets devoted to jokes, politics and barbed comment of all kinds. Another twenty-five newspapers flourished outside London.
³⁸

One of many newspaper cuttings showing the ‘Wild Youth’. To the right he climbs a tree like a monkey

 

The Wild Boy craze caused a new deluge of newspapers and pamphlets to pour off the presses. Few of them were accurate: ‘some inconsistent with themselves, some with possibility, and most of them with fact’.
³⁹
The minuscule number of accurate details about Peter’s life were soon distorted or lost.

While they were ostensibly all about Peter, the real intention behind these publications was to mock the court, the courtiers and even the whole silly race of men.
⁴⁰
The Wild Boy’s lack of worldly knowledge exposed the shallow foundations upon which fashionable society was built. London’s satirists ingeniously invented more and more ludicrous transgressions that Peter was said to have committed: he’d tried to kiss Sir Robert Walpole’s wife; he licked people’s hands in greeting; he wore a hat in the king’s presence; he’d stolen the Lord Chamberlain’s staff.

This was also the year of the publication of Daniel Defoe’s
Mere
NATURE Delineated: OR, A BODY without a SOUL. BEING
OBSERVATIONS UPON THE Young FORESTER Lately brought
to Town from GERMANY.
Published on 23 July, this was a wild cadenza of speculation about Peter’s life, situation and encounters with the courtiers. It would be a terrible indictment of the present age, Defoe argued, if the Wild Boy had actively chosen his previous way of life, to ‘converse with the quadrupeds of the forest, and retire from human society’. He was really suggesting that Peter was in fact the only truly sensible person alive.

And Defoe was sensitive, where the others were not, to the fact that he was using a real and defenceless person, not just a freak, as fodder for his journalism. If he took liberties, he wrote, it was at the expense of ‘our modern men of mode’. Unlike the other journalists, who amused themselves and their readers at Peter’s expense, Defoe showed some humanity towards the boy.

Peter himself ‘is certainly an object of great compassion’, he acknowledged, ‘and so I treat him all along’.
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*

So what were the court ceremonies and absurdities of which Peter was so blissfully unaware?

How to bow, an art you learnt from your dancing master

 

All new courtiers were expected to learn the rules. John Hervey had to endure a ‘lecture of instructions, as to bows, steps, attitudes, & c.’ before taking up the post of Vice-Chamberlain.
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Lord Chesterfield (once again) describes the uncouth gait of those unfamiliar with court etiquette and accoutrements: ‘when an awkward fellow first comes into a room, it is highly probable, that his sword gets between his legs, and throws him down’. Then he
drops his hat – twice, probably – and spends a quarter of an hour getting himself back in order again.
⁴³

Peter was supposed to learn to mock idiots such as the ‘country boor’ who did not know what to do with his
chapeau-bras
: ‘sometimes he has it in his hand, sometimes in his mouth, and often betrayed a great inclination to put it on his head, concluding that it was a damned troublesome, useless thing’.
⁴⁴

The Wild Boy also had a shocking tendency simply to sit down when he felt like it, ‘before any one, without distinction of persons’.
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As we know, the drawing room was carefully kept seat-free, ‘there being no chairs in the room lest anyone should be guilty of seating themselves’, and courtier Mary Cowper found a week in waiting made her ‘ill from standing so long upon [her] feet’.
⁴⁶

It was necessary to bow three times, ‘according to ancient custom’, when passing the vacant royal throne, and at night it was turned to face the wall in order to neutralise its power.
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When the king himself appeared, the whole court sank into ‘a profound reverence or bow’, which he’d acknowledge with a slight nod.
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To leave the king’s presence was a particular challenge to a lady. She could not depart without making three curtseys, and then had to reverse out of the door – all quite a feat in her wide-skirted court mantua and heels. A newly appointed Maid of Honour had to take lessons with a dancing master just to learn how to ‘stand still without tottering’.
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Maids of Honour were punished if they turned their backs upon their mistress, and even more so if they committed the horrible crime of crossing their arms.
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And it was not possible to leave the royal presence without permission. One lady-in-waiting with a bursting bladder was forced to urinate on the floor, producing a humiliating puddle as big as a dining table which threatened the shoes of bystanders.
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What on earth was the point of such trivia? The surprising truth is that etiquette could be used to make a court career, or to break it. It was a clear indicator of status. Being treated with ceremonious respect could raise one’s credit immeasurably, while an
absence of ceremony could be terribly wounding. The modern historian Bob Bucholz calls court etiquette ‘a weapon in the arsenal of the monarchy, as potent as any polemic or art; more flexible and subtle than any army or navy’.
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And so it was only when alone that the courtiers could whistle, loosen their garters or loll in an easy chair. Any of these things when done in company Lord Chesterfield thought ‘injurious to superiors, shocking and offensive to equals, brutal and insulting to inferiors’.
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Chesterfield definitively summed up the sterile and inhuman side of court life when he condemned even ‘frequent and loud laughter’ as being fit only for the London mob.

He was full of smug self-satisfaction when he claimed – so pitifully – that nobody had ever heard him laugh.
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Peter the Wild Boy, of course, ignored this curious nonsense. He seemed to settle down in this strange new world without a care, meeting its probing gaze with his own roving eyes and laughter. His gusts of giggles rang through the palace, as did his equine neighs and his merry, if wordless, songs.

*

As time went on, though, the Wild Boy was gradually forced into new and unnatural behaviours, and began to show signs of distress. The first time Peter saw someone undressing, he was ‘in great pain’, thinking the man was peeling the very skin off his leg when he removed his stockings.
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He hated clothes, but the courtiers made him wear one of his two new suits – one blue, the other green – with red stockings.
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His dressers had enormous trouble in getting Peter’s suits on and off, and they seemed ‘extremely uneasy to him’. As well as the daily struggle over his clothes, Peter could not be made ‘to lie down on a bed, but sits and sleeps in a corner of the room’.
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Nor did he understand the use of a chamber pot and ‘foul’d himself, without offering to do otherwise’.
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It was like trying to dress a dog, frustrating to both parties. But these poignant details of a little boy bewildered really pierce the heart.