Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (29 page)

To Henrietta the situation was unbearable. As she put it, ‘I have been a slave twenty years without ever receiving a reason for any one thing I ever was oblig’d to do.’
¹⁵⁰

On the increasingly rare occasions when he was at home with them rather than closeted with Henrietta or away in Hanover, his family had to endure George II’s brusque and egocentric manner and his deadly dull lectures upon the esoteric German connections of their family. On one grotesque occasion at Kensington Palace he burst in and

Sir Robert Walpole’s brother likewise found himself in perpetual disgrace for ‘disputing a point of German genealogy’ with the king.
¹⁵²
George II could never laugh at himself. When he learnt about the Rumpsteak Club, whose members consisted of everybody he’d ‘rumped’ or snubbed in the drawing room, he simply exploded with wrath. ‘
Quoy!
’ he bellowed with futile pride. ‘
Est qui se moque de moi?
[What! Are they laughing at me?]’
¹⁵³

According to John Hervey, who always took Caroline’s side, the king’s hideously bad temper was unjustified and unfathomable. He was ‘abominably and perpetually so harsh and rough’ that she ‘could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any one act unreproved’.
¹⁵⁴
But with true royal pride Caroline suffered silently and did her best to hide her hurt: ‘she seldom forgot that she was a queen, and always kept up a due state both in public and private’.
¹⁵⁵

At least Caroline had other interests and hobbies to provide distraction and comfort, and at Kensington Palace these included her wonderful cabinet of curiosities. This was a room that in Germany might have been called a
Wunderkammer
, like the one
assembled by George II’s grandmother at the Hanoverian palace of Herrenhausen. An inventory of the contents of Caroline’s curiosity museum at Kensington shows that it contained bizarre treasures such as a crystal cup containing a humming bird, ‘two small unicorns’ horns’ and drawers full of vintage medals ‘apt to jump out of their places’ when opened.
¹⁵⁶

She constructed an even more grandiose exhibition of marvels and relics from the past in the gardens at Richmond, her country home. Here William Kent built her a curious chamber known as ‘Merlin’s Cave’, and she filled it with waxworks of characters from ancient times. Caroline charmed the courtiers with her fondness for British antiquity, joking that ‘she was always v. angry with the English when she was reading their history to see how violent and raging they were against one another’.
¹⁵⁷
Her husband, of course, had no time for this whimsical activity and told her that she ‘deserved to be abused for such childish silly stuff’.
¹⁵⁸
Nevertheless, it was here, in her wonderland at Richmond, that Caroline enjoyed the historical and intellectual pursuits that were balm for her soul.
¹⁵⁹

She even went so far as to procure a real live hermit, Stephen Duck, the so-called Thresher Poet, to live at Richmond. Once his literary gift was discovered, he was plucked from an obscure life as a rural labourer, forced to leave behind his family and brought to settle in the gardens as a royal pet. Unfortunately the forced transplantation was not a success, and he later committed suicide.
¹⁶⁰
And another human oddity likewise spent part of his time down at Richmond. The accounts of the money expended at Caroline’s residence there include payments ‘for the maintenance of Peter the Wild Boy’.
¹⁶¹

*

Some of the most intense scenes in the breakdown of the eccentric but enduring love triangle between George II, Caroline and Henrietta were played out between the two women in the bedchamber, during the queen’s toilette.

George II and Caroline submitted with good grace to the
dressing ceremonies expected of monarchs, and their bedchambers were opened daily to the court. George II allowed the senior members of his household to dress him of a morning, and then in surged the ‘gaping crowd’ for the meeting, greeting and business talk that comprised the official levee.
¹⁶²
From 1714, Henrietta had served Caroline as a Bedchamber Woman, an honour paid for with difficult and sometimes demeaning duties.

When the Ladies of the Bedchamber had renounced their obligation to do real work, they’d nevertheless tried to maintain their right of access to Caroline’s bedroom. Some of them were quite astoundingly persistent. Caroline’s recovery from the birth of a stillborn son in November 1716 was made no easier by one such quarrel about access. Despite the fact that the princess was desperately ill, the Countess of Manchester was adamant that her position still entitled her to enter. Her insistence on such a thing at such a time incensed even the etiquette-obsessed court: ‘everybody knew she was a fool’.
¹⁶³
But on normal occasions the courtiers were absolutely convinced that such trivia were indeed matters of life and death.

The position of Bedchamber Woman was not physically demanding, but the long hours of waiting, the boredom and the necessity for total self-possession took their toll. Molly Lepell once said that ‘the life of a Maid of Honour was of all things the most miserable’ and she ‘wished that every woman who envied it had a specimen of it’.
¹⁶⁴
Both jobs could often be quite mind-bendingly tedious.

In fact, these posts in the royal household, once the pinnacle of aspiration, were slowly declining in terms of prestige. With the passing of greater power to Parliament the court was gradually becoming a backwater, and the ambitious no longer vied for the great court offices such as Groom of the Stool. By the early years of the nineteenth century, the offices would become something of a joke.
¹⁶⁵
Reformer John Wade in 1831 had quite a rant upon the subject: ‘to what public purport … are the offices of groom of the stole, master of the hawks, master of the buck-hounds, master of
the horse, or grooms and lords of the bedchamber?’ He thought them merely ‘menial offices, and unbecoming to the dignity of a nobleman’.
¹⁶⁶
Indeed, in 1837, a quiescent House of Commons heard that no Groom of the Stool was to be appointed to the new household of Queen Victoria. The only recorded comment heard in the House was ‘a laugh’ at the very idea.
¹⁶⁷

Henrietta, though, belonged to a generation that still broadly considered personal service to the monarch to be honourable and valuable.

But her duties were made more than usually onerous by the psychological background to her employment. If anyone mentioned her role as royal mistress in Caroline’s presence, the queen sharply rebuked the speaker and reminded him or her that he or she ‘was speaking of the King’s servant, and to the King’s wife’.
¹⁶⁸

*

So Henrietta went every morning to Caroline’s bedchamber to help the queen prepare for the day. Her duties did not include the bringing of water and the emptying of the chamber pot, jobs which were done by the ‘necessary women’. (They were reimbursed for their mops, brooms and brushes in addition to their wages.
¹⁶⁹
) The use of chamber pots at court was not necessarily restricted to private moments: the French ambassador’s wife, for example, was notorious for the ‘frequency and quantity of her pissing which she does not fail to do at least ten times a day amongst a cloud of witnesses’.
¹⁷⁰

Henrietta did have to hold the basin of water while Caroline washed, beginning with her teeth. The current method was to use ‘a soft spunge and warm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times’.
¹⁷¹
Rather repulsively for Henrietta, ‘The basin takes whatever comes/ The scrapings of her teeth and gums.’
¹⁷²
Of course, tooth decay could not be avoided completely. Poor Princess Anne’s new husband, William of Orange, possessed breath ‘more offensive than it is possible for those who have not been offended by it to imagine’.
¹⁷³

Sometimes, but not always, the washing of other body parts
followed. In 1750, John Wilkes observed that ‘the nobler parts are never in this island washed by women’, and John Hervey described a typical drawing-room gathering as ‘sweating and stinking in abundance as usual’.
¹⁷⁴
Caroline, however, bathed rather more frequently than her contemporaries. Her necessary woman, Susanna Ireland, would lug up ewers of hot water to fill her bath. The queen would remain dressed throughout in a yellow canvas shift.
¹⁷⁵

Lord Chesterfield gave his son a piece of advice that reveals the general state of eighteenth-century fingernails: ‘you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people’s always are’.
¹⁷⁶
Caroline likewise liked her servants to be well-manicured, and Peter Wentworth grumbled that once ‘when I did not think she saw me, I was biting my nails. She called to me and said: “Oh fie! Mr Wentworth, you bite your nails very prettily.”’ He begged her pardon, and explained that he was trying to save the money the doctor demanded for cutting them.
¹⁷⁷

Caroline maintained a show of polite friendliness while Henrietta stood by with the basin and towels, and made a point of calling her servant her ‘good Howard’.
¹⁷⁸
But the fact that Caroline’s hostility was concealed behind a veneer of charm made Henrietta’s life even more desolate. Caroline also used to call Henrietta ‘by way of banter, her sister Howard’. It might have sounded kind, but in reality it was ‘the strongest mark of aversion and contempt’.
¹⁷⁹

The false friendship of the queen and the increasing coldness of the king must have made Henrietta’s burden far heavier than the actual basin she was supposed to hold. As John Hervey put it, her task was utterly thankless: ‘she was forced to live in the constant subjection of a wife with all the reproach of a mistress’.
¹⁸⁰
But she did so with wonderful grace. Alexander Pope wrote that Henrietta had ‘as much good nature’ as if she’d been ‘bred among lambs and turtle-doves, instead of princes and court-ladies’.
¹⁸¹

And Caroline had no qualms about letting her real feelings
flash through at any sign of insubordination. On one occasion (in Caroline’s words) Henrietta attempted to pick

Exasperated by these ‘demeaning’ duties, the ‘most servile offices’ that Caroline could dream up, Henrietta took the trouble to consult precedent about the responsibilities of the Bedchamber Woman.
¹⁸³
She asked her friend Dr Arbuthnot to extract the exact job description from a retired predecessor who had served under Queen Anne. She hoped to find evidence that she need not hold the basin and thereby could avoid her daily ordeal.

After Caroline had washed, Henrietta handed over the queen’s garments, one by one, to the more important Lady of the Bedchamber, who then gave them to the queen. Mary Cowper explained how the dance of dressing commenced: ‘the Duchess of St Albans put on the Princess’s shift, according to court rules’.
¹⁸⁴
Another ex-member of the bedchamber staff likewise recalled that ‘the Bedchamber Woman gave the fan to the Lady’, who then handed it to the queen.
¹⁸⁵
These nuances of role between the ‘Lady’ and the ‘Woman’ were considered to be of cut-throat importance.

The shift that Caroline wore next to her skin was made of very fine Holland linen.
¹⁸⁶
Over it went a quilted white dimity petticoat, then a set of soft stays with silver hooks, and then a set of crimson whalebone hoops to support the skirt of her patterned silk dress. Caroline liked to wear the mantua, a coat-like dress worn over wide hoops, and bought no fewer than fourteen different models between 1730 and 1734.
¹⁸⁷
The queen’s clothes-shopping was prodigious: twenty fans a quarter; four silver girdles in a single month. Finally, the finishing touches were required: the Bedchamber Woman ‘pulled on the Queen’s gloves’ and ‘the page
of the backstairs was called in to put on the Queen’s shoes’.
¹⁸⁸
She favoured slip-on mules rather than shoes, and her ‘walking slippers’ had red heels.
¹⁸⁹