Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (3 page)

The Great Drawing Room, crammed full of courtiers, lay at the heart of the Georgian royal palace. Here the king mingled most evenings with his guests, signalling welcome with a nod and displeasure with a blank stare or, worse, a turned back.

The winners and the losers of the Georgian age could calculate precisely how high they’d climbed – or how far they’d fallen – by the warmth of their reception at court. High-heeled and elegant shoes crushed into the floorboards of the drawing room the reputations of those who’d dropped out of favour, while those whose status was on the rise stood firmly in possession of their few square inches of space.

In the eighteenth century, the palace’s most elegant assembly room was in fact a bloody battlefield. This was a world of skulduggery, politicking, wigs and beauty spots, where fans whistled open like flick knives. Intrigue hissed through the crowd, and court factions were also known as ‘fuctions’.
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Beneath their powder and perfume, the courtiers stank of sweat, insecurity and glittering ambition.

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The ambitious visitors crowding into the drawing room were usually unaware that they were under constant observation from behind the scenes. The palace servants – overlooked but ever-present – knew of every move made at court. That’s why, in this book, we’ll meet kings and queens, but also many of the people who worked to meet their most intimate needs.

The Georgian royal household was staggeringly vast and complicated. The highest ranking of its members, the courtiers proper, were the ladies-and gentlemen-in-waiting. These noblemen and
women were glad to serve the king and queen in even quite menial ways because of the honour involved.

Beneath them in status were about 950 other royal servants, organised into a byzantine web of departments ranging from hairdressing to rat-catching, and extending right down to the four ‘necessary women’ who cleaned the palace and emptied the ‘necessaries’ or chamber pots.
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If you want to know what these people looked like, you need only visit Kensington Palace. There, in the 1720s, the artist William Kent painted portraits of forty-five royal servants that look down upon palace visitors from the walls and ceiling of the King’s Grand Staircase.

Kensington Palace itself had existed long before the Hanoverian dynasty arrived in Britain to replace the Stuarts in 1714, yet it was also the one royal home that George I and his son really transformed and made their own. The servants there witnessed romance and violence, intrigue and infighting, and almost unimaginable acts of hatred and cruelty between members of the same family.

I often find myself climbing the King’s Grand Staircase during the course of my working day, and the faces of the people populating it have always fascinated me. I’ve spent many hours studying them, wondering who they all were, and curiosity finally compelled me to try to find out.

When I first began investigating their identities, I was surprised to discover that some of the names traditionally attached to the characters were wrong, while other obvious connections had been overlooked. My efforts to unearth each sitter’s true story led me on a much longer and more exciting journey than I’d expected, through caches of court papers in London, Windsor, Oxford and Suffolk. I found myself examining paintings at Buckingham Palace, gardens in Germany, and hitching lifts from kind strangers in rural Hertfordshire. My adventures both in and outside the archives led eventually to this book.

Those picked to sit for the staircase paintings were the most
appealing, exotic and memorable among the lower servants. Some of them possessed something rarer than rubies: the influence that came with access to the royal ear. Their colleagues included some of the oddest characters of the Georgian age: a dwarf comedian; a feral boy; a rapacious royal mistress; a mysterious turbaned Turk; bored if beautiful Maids of Honour. I’ve selected the stories of just seven of them to illuminate the strange phenomenon of the Georgian court and to give a new perspective upon the lives of the kings, queens and princes inhabiting the rarefied court stratosphere above their heads.

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While the monarchy was slowly sinking in status throughout the eighteenth century, the glamour of the court still attracted the pretty, the witty, the pushy and the powerful.

But although Kensington Palace teemed with ambitious and clever people in search of fame and fashion, it was also a lonely place, and courtiers and servants alike often found themselves weary and heart-sore. Success in their world demanded a level head and a cold heart; secrets were never safe. A courtier had to keep up appearances in the face of gambling debts, loss of office or even unwanted pregnancy.

Thousands longed to be part of the court, but John Hervey, one of our seven, knew all too well that danger lay hidden behind the palace walls.

‘I do not know any people in the world’, he wrote to a courtier colleague, ‘so much to be pitied as that gay young company with which you and I stand every day in the drawing-room.’
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