Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (43 page)

At 10 o’clock that night things were looking decidedly bleak: John Hervey’s mother Lady Bristol told her husband that ‘the Queen’s vomiting is returned, which has been ceased for three days … I am afraid to say what I think; I am going back to my post’.
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Throughout her ordeal, Caroline remained stronger than those around her. ‘She had not the least fears of the pains she endured,’ it was said, nor was she frightened ‘of the last closing scene’. Her only concern was ‘for the King’s affliction’, which was ‘certainly as sincere and intense, as ever human nature sustain’d’.
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In one of Caroline’s last lucid conversations with her husband, she returned to him a ring he had once given her, saying that she owed everything to him. She begged him to marry again after her death, but ‘wiping his eyes, and sobbing between every word’, he stammered out his response to her suggestion: ‘
Non – j’aurai – des
– maîtresses
[No … I will have … mistresses]’.
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He might take lovers, he said, but he would never take a second queen.

Then he kissed her face and her hands a hundred times.

The end came on Sunday 20 November at 11 o’clock, when Caroline asked for one of the Bed-chamber Women to take away the candle that stood by her bed. Her husband asked her if the light was hurting her eyes. ‘No Sir,’ she said, ‘I wou’d spare you the affliction of seeing me die.’
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Caroline lay quietly in the dark for a quarter of an hour, before asking her daughter Amelia to kneel by her bed and read a prayer. Before Amelia had finished, Caroline whispered, ‘I am going,’ and covered her mouth with her hand.

It was her last gesture. As she died, ‘the King’s hand was in hers’.
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‘Like an earthquake’, Caroline’s death was a ‘shock to the nation’.
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Her last moments were talked about, written about, debated and endlessly reinterpreted. It was said that she ‘died very heroically’, yet at the same time with ‘all the resignation imaginable’.
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Her chaplain, Dr Alured Clarke, founder of hospitals, sought and
found evidence of her Christian belief when he wrote at length about the prayer she’d said ‘of her own composing’, which ‘demonstrated the vigour of a great and good mind’.
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On the other hand, the old Duchess of Marlborough, with her customary plain speaking, said that Dr Clarke had written a ‘nauseous panegyric’ aimed at earning its author ‘the first bishoprick that falls’.
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Others preferred to believe that, like a true queen of the Enlightenment, Caroline had refused the sacrament on her deathbed and that the Archbishop of Canterbury had covered up for her, discreetly fudging the matter by telling those who asked that she ‘was in a heavenly disposition’ rather than directly answering the question of whether she had taken it or not.
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Some people thought, rather unsympathetically, that ‘the Queen’s death was wholly owing to her own fault’, and John Ranby (with a justifiable concern for his reputation) was heard to declare that if he’d been told about the rupture ‘two days sooner, she should have been walking about the next day’.
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Still others found consolation for their own lowly status by reflecting on the fact that even the ‘glaring mask of Royalty’ hid only ‘flesh, however dignified or distinguished’.
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But the last word may go to Dr Clarke, who here sums up the views of many:

Orthodox believer or religious radical, everyone found something to emulate in this horrible but admirable death.

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Now Caroline’s corpse was treated with the greatest respect and embalmed ‘in the manner of the Egyptians, at the expense of between 5 and
£
600’. ‘Her whole family’ of children and servants attended it, just ‘as if she was alive’.
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The queen’s Ladies of the Bed-chamber, Lord Chamberlain and
Master of the Horse watched over her body by day, while two Maids of Honour, two Bedchamber Women and an equerry kept guard at night.
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Peter Wentworth reported that the servants were on vigil from noon till nine, with a break of three hours for dinner; ‘this to be continued till she’s bury’d’.
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The obese Queen Caroline, sketched on her deathbed by one of her ladies. Alexander Pope wrote of this picture: ‘ALAS! what room for Flattery, or for Pride!/She’s dead! – but thus she looked the hour she dy’d’

 

At Caroline’s funeral there were twelve Yeomen of the Guard to carry her coffin to Westminster Abbey.
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It was preceded by her crown, carried by her chamberlain on a black velvet cushion, and followed by a procession of her ladies in black crape.
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Because Prince Frederick was still in disgrace, Princess Amelia was chief mourner, and it was ‘never heard that children grieve[d] more for a mother’ than she and her sisters did.
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For many weeks, George II was unable to speak of his wife without weeping, and ‘look’d as if he had lost his crown’.
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Sir Robert Walpole found the king ‘with a flood of tears gushing from his royal eyes’. With agonised sobs, he reminisced how his wife’s sweetness had softened even ‘his own harshness and resentment’.
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His daughters ordered the queens to be taken out of the pack of cards for the king’s evening game because the sight of them ‘put him into so great a disorder’.
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One sad day he borrowed a portrait of Caroline from a courtier in order to meditate with it for two hours in his bed-chamber. At the end of this time, he had to some extent come to terms with his loss. ‘Take this picture away,’ he said. ‘I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.’
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Given that his mistress Henrietta had, for so many years, been almost literally in the position of buckling Caroline’s shoes, it is clear where the king’s true passion lay.

And on into the new year of 1738, the bereaved king remained troubled by disturbing dreams. According to court gossip, he made a midnight journey to Westminster Abbey and visited Caroline’s vault, ordering her coffin to be broken open so that he could see her embalmed body by candlelight. He needed to reassure himself that she really was dead after seeing a vision of her walking abroad once more.
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Others were equally hard hit. It was said that John Hervey was strangely tranquil, ‘as calm as ever … but afflicted to the greatest degree’. He looked upon Caroline’s death ‘as the greatest misfortune that could befall him’. In fact, ‘the loss of so much of the pleasure of his life’ made ‘the rest not worth thinking of’.
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When his icy calm broke down, it did so dramatically. At one court party Hervey found that even the queen’s death could not curb the high spirits of the Maids of Honour. Totally unlike his usual urbane self, he simply swore at them in the foulest language.
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John Hervey had written, with all the sincerity of which he was
capable, that Caroline was the only person who could control or steer him:

He and she had been linked by a strange friendship that vaulted the chasms between them: a gap in age, between royalty and commoner, between German and English, between male and female. Never again would he hear his crony exclaiming her characteristic ‘Oh,
dummer Teuffel
! [Oh, dull devil!]’ about a tiresome courtier, hear her contagious laugh or see her dancing, dangerously, in her slip-on mules.
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John Hervey was one of the few people who understood just how much the constant compliments and complaints of court life bored and blunted Caroline. He railed against the stereotypical courtier or ‘court-brute’ who failed to understand that one ‘should never lead a Queen but by the hand’.

Both of them were interminably tired by a life that underused their considerable minds, and Hervey thought that there was little more to keep him in the trivial, repetitive role of Vice-Chamberlain, ‘fit for nothing but to carry candles and set chairs all my life’.
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His relationship with Caroline was in many ways the most significant of all his days, because for once he’d had no hand in ending it.

Now he wrote, tenderly, of his lost friend: ‘sure in sleep no dullness you need fear’.
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And while he had been devoting his time to keeping Caroline amused, John Hervey had let the other great love of his life slip away. On 15 March 1736, Stephen Fox had made a sudden and startling marriage, to the heiress Elizabeth Strangways Horner. ‘The Town’, it was reported at the time, ‘is at present very much entertain’d with little Ste: Fox’s wedding, who on Monday night last ran away with the great fortune Miss Horner, who is but just
thirteen years old & very low and childish of her age.’
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If John Hervey had been expecting his lover to make a marriage of convenience, for form and money’s sake, he was disappointed, for Ste seemed distressingly affectionate towards his child bride.

Having lost his wife, his queen and the man he loved best, John Hervey was now left alone.

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Peter Wentworth was similarly stricken by Caroline’s death. ‘I am obliged to tell you’, he wrote to his brother, ‘that the best of Queens died Sunday night between ten and 11.’
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Caroline had loved to embarrass the bemused and blushing Wentworth with her affection. Her characteristic tease had been to call him ‘
une tres bon enfant
’ and to josh him with a mixture of mockery and kindness: ‘we are speaking of you; you know I love you, and you shall know I love, I do really love you!’ Wentworth was always left speechless by her adoration, being able only to make ‘low bows’, as he ‘had not the impromptu wit nor assurance to make any other answer’.
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Wentworth’s shell of shyness had been shattered by Caroline alone: ‘I swear by all the Gods, if it had not been for the Queen’s extreme goodness to me, my heart had been broak,’ he had said.
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Unfortunately, the cure for a broken heart would now seem to Wentworth only to lie at the bottom of a ‘bumper of Burgundy’.
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He even attached little importance to his humorous, lively, merry letters. ‘What I writ’, he stated, ‘goes for the writing of a drunk fellow, & as such ought not to be valued.’
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‘A drunk fellow’ who was ‘not to be valued’ was exactly how he saw himself.

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George II had promised his wife that he would look after her servants, and he kept his word. Like the others, Peter Wentworth found that his place and salary were assured, for he was to be kept on ‘to do duty about the Princesses’.
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Lady Bristol described how the king broke the news about their futures to the servants: ‘I
think in all my life I never saw anything in a tragedy ever come up to it; his tears flowed so fast he could not utter a word, nor was there a dry eye in the room … my spirits have been more than ordinary sunk ever since.’
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Mrs Purcell, the late queen’s dresser, agreed that they had ‘lost the best queen, friend & mistress, that ever servants had: yet still all my faculties seem benumb’d as if seized with a palsy … what one suffers with
La
Coeur Serré
[a heavy heart]’.
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