Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court (45 page)

It took five years for the answer to Sir Robert Walpole’s riddle to emerge.

In 1742, the drawing room at Kensington Palace would witness the deadliest duel yet in a long-running battle to establish who would ‘have the management’ of the monarch. Two main contenders had emerged, and two rival mistresses were fighting for the prize of Caroline’s vacant place in the king’s heart.

At the time of her death, some people had thought that George II would certainly die of grief, but others envisaged some eventual form of recovery. ‘Though he is certainly extremely dejected by the great loss,’ observed the Duchess of Marlborough, ‘a heart is a long time a-breaking; and I have known very few instances of dying from the passion of love.’
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Still others predicted that the king would mourn Caroline ‘for a fortnight, forget her in a month’ and then get hold of ‘two or three women … to lie with now and then’.
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But all the candidates for the position of royal lover hoped to become the main mistress, or
mistress en titre
as she was known in the continental courts. In that competition there could be only one real winner.

Sir Robert Walpole was extremely worried about who might end up on top: she might be avaricious; she might be ambitious; she might get the king into all sorts of scrapes. The sight of the elderly king hunting for women was beginning to amuse and to horrify: observers thought he was simply getting too old for japes of this kind. He was now nearly sixty, a considerable age by the standards of his century. People began to say that for an old man
‘to be playing these youthful pranks, and fancying himself in love, was quite ridiculous’.
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Ridiculous it may have been, but George II had warned his dying wife that he needed female company. And he didn’t just want sexual services. Despite his very public tantrums, in private he required constant reassurance and soothing, just like a cross little boy. It would be a tall order for any one woman to provide it.

The battle lines were clearly drawn in the years following Caroline’s death, and by 1742 just two strong contestants remained in the field. With John Hervey once again observing from the sidelines, the struggle was near its conclusion.

Which of the two rival mistresses, Hervey asked, could quench the king’s ‘amorous heat, so unexpectedly diffused through his veins at such years’?
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The battle of the mistresses came to its climax one drawing-room evening in October 1742. On one side was the plump and placid Amalie Sophie Marianne Wendt, who bore the married name of von Wallmoden. Dark-haired and twinkling-eyed, she had many aces in her hand.

Not least among them was the support of first minister Sir Robert Walpole. ‘I am for Madame Walmoden,’ he declared against all her rivals. ‘I’ll have nothing to do with your girls.’
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George II had met and fallen for the German Amalie well before Caroline’s death, during his summer visit to Hanover in 1735. Back then she was thirty-one, the daughter of an army family. Considering the close-knit nature of the Hanover community, it is not entirely shocking to discover that her grandmother had been an early mistress of George I’s.
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Amalie was married to a magistrate named Adam Gottlieb von Wallmoden, and the couple had a son and daughter, Franz Ernst and Friderike. But happily, von Wallmoden proved a complaisant husband when his wife caught the king’s eye.

George II dallied with Amalie in Hanover long enough to cause serious dissatisfaction back in Britain. ‘The people belonging
to the Court were uneasy at it, as it made the Court so much more unpopular,’ and ‘the tradesmen were all uneasy’ too because it was bad for business.
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Court events brought their best customers into town from their country estates, and they were not held when the king was away.

It seemed that this time George II might have been seriously wounded by Cupid’s arrow.

As was his usual habit, he had kept his wife fully abreast of this latest affair. ‘I know you will love the Wallmoden,
because she loves
me
’ was one tactless phrase from him to her which the courtiers treasured.
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Caroline had also been treated to a full description ‘of Madame Wallmoden’s looks, brains and character’. His new lover was nowhere near beautiful, the king admitted, and she lacked a dazzling wit. But she was charming and possessed ‘a very agreeable countenance’ indeed.
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Those who knew Amalie remarked upon her ‘fine black eyes, & brown hair’.
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Short and ‘inclined to be corpulent’, she had a round face, large eyes and elegant hands. While she was certainly not ‘a perfect or a blooming beauty’, John Hervey found her stylish and charming: ‘a young married woman of the first fashion’.
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In fact, her succulent curves, combined with her restful, turtle-dove character, made it ‘impossible for any man of taste and sensibility to avoid being in love’ with her.
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Despite the delight he found in Amalie von Wallmoden’s company, guilt finally forced George II into coming home after his Hanover visit of 1735. He made his way back to London at top speed, once again to fall into the wide-open arms of his Caroline. She welcomed him warmly and without reproach, ‘glueing her mouth to his hand’.
¹⁴
But thinking fondly of his beloved Hanover and his adored Amalie, George II was heard to grumble that the English were nothing but a race of ‘King-killers and republicans’, and that he had to pay them ‘not to cut his throat’.
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On his return to St James’s Palace, the king had Amalie’s portrait hung up at the foot of his bed. The compliment
demonstrated ‘the violence of his love’, people thought, but they also murmured that he really might have constrained himself out of consideration for his wife and daughters.
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His daily habits changed. Previously he’d spent each morning until eleven with Caroline. But now he abandoned his wife in order to write instead ‘for two or three hours to Madame Wallmoden, who never failed sending and receiving a letter every post’. Understandably, this was the period during which Caroline began to fall prey to doubt and depression.

By May 1736, George II was determined to return to Hanover, in order to keep a promise he’d made to Amalie to be back for her birthday on the 29th of that month.
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When he arrived, he was presented with a newborn baby: Johann Ludwig von Wallmoden. He would never openly acknowledge this child as his son, but he was widely assumed to be the father. Certainly Amalie told George II that this was the case, and his ‘silly vanity’ in his senile virility cemented her position even further.
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Once again the king dallied overlong in Hanover that summer, reliving the gratifications of having a young wife and family. Back in London yet another satirical poster mysteriously appeared on the gate of St James’s Palace:

When the king finally arrived back home early in 1737, it was actually to spend his last few months, and to become reconciled, with Caroline. Yet he planned to invite Amalie to come to Britain as well so that he need not be parted from either his wife or his mistress.

*

Perhaps surprisingly, Caroline had agreed to this proposal. Having
endured the
ménage à trois
with Henrietta for so many years, she’d accepted Sir Robert Walpole’s advice that she should once again be tolerant. ‘If you can but once get this favourite to St James’s,’ he argued, ‘she will in three months be everything Lady Suffolk was, but deaf.’ Walpole faced Caroline with an unenviable choice: ‘whether you will fear her at a distance or despise her near’.
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So, when George II proved to be incapable of dragging himself away from Hanover in time to return to London for his birthday in 1736, Caroline had begged her husband to bring Amalie back with him too.
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She was stoutly welcoming in attitude, and promised to ‘get Lady Suffolk’s lodgings ready immediately’. She even planned to put her own books into storage so that Amalie could have more space.

In addition to the support of Sir Robert Walpole, then, Amalie von Wallmoden also had the (reluctant) blessing of the queen.

But Caroline did not really want Amalie in the palace, and everyone knew it. The Ladies of the Bedchamber were overheard ‘saying they hoped never to see this saucy whore brought under Her Majesty’s nose’, and in private Caroline ‘dreaded’ Amalie’s arrival. She now regretted having driven away Henrietta, who had been ‘powerless, and so little formidable’.
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Amalie, in fact, failed to appear in England during Caroline’s lifetime, rightly fearing that she would be far from universally welcome. Wilder London gossip claimed that the king could not afford the
£
50,000 she’d demanded as a fee for coming (as she was German, everyone assumed that she must be greedy).
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And then, of course, Caroline had fallen ill, and her husband’s love for her had been reignited, burning stronger than ever. When he was left bereft by Caroline’s death, it was with some hope of cheering him up that Sir Robert Walpole finally sent for the abandoned Amalie the following year.

In June 1738, Amalie and a few attendants crossed the Channel and arrived in London. She lived at first in ‘a mighty mean dirty lodging in St James’s Street’, but this was only while the official mistress’s lodgings were being prepared for her at St James’s.
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Again anonymous and critical verses appeared on the palace gates:

George II with his late-life mistress, Amalie. Caroline’s portrait looks down with resignation from the wall behind them

 

Amalie was soon allocated lodgings at both St James’s and Kensington Palaces, and none other than Molly Hervey was asked to recommend English servants to pad out her entourage.
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The housekeeper at Kensington, Mrs Jane Keen, was still in harness but by now made immobile by gout. She prepared for Amalie the
spacious but damp apartment formerly occupied by Henrietta. Amalie did at least insist upon having it smartened up with expensive wallpaper.
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Since the queen’s death, Kensington Palace had no longer been bustling with busy courtiers, and people wondered why Amalie was placed in Henrietta’s ‘unwholesome apartment’ when other, drier, nicer ones were available. She herself was philosophical on the subject: there may well have been better apartments, she said, ‘
mais pas pour moi
’.
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It was another example of George II’s extreme devotion to precedent and routine, and also an indication of Amalie’s calm, soothing character. Wisely, she never wearied the king with ‘solicitations either for herself, her relations, her creatures or dependents’.
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She was biddable, not formidable.

Now Amalie began to appear in the palace drawing room of an evening, ‘like one that has been used to the courts of Princes’.
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The warmth of her reception caused a stir, and it was considered ‘quite new; for, though all kings have had mistresses, they were attended at their own lodgings, and not in so public a manner’.
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And, in 1740, all the other potential mistresses received a sad setback when Amalie, newly divorced by her German husband, was naturalised as a British citizen and given the title of Countess of Yarmouth. (There was once an embarrassing incident at a dinner when a gentleman unfamiliar with the court proposed a toast to the ‘Count of Yarmouth’, failing to realise that he didn’t exist.
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)