Transcription
Life at Court Through the Eyes of
Queen Caroline
Dr Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces
The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace
Wednesday, 18 June 2014
Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for having me. Now before I get going with
my topic of Queen Caroline tonight, I hope that you will bear with me if I say a word or two
about my own organisation, Historic Royal Palaces. We are the independent charity that
looks after the five unoccupied royal palaces of London. So obviously not this one, not
Windsor Castle, The Queen still lives there, we've got the empty ones! And I have to tell you
that we get no money from the Government or the Royal Family and we deserve your
financial support! Our biggest site in terms of visitor numbers is the Tower of London, of
course.
Here my fellow curators and I are responsible for helping to look after the instruments of
torture! And the arms and armour, and of course the Crown Jewels are there too.
Sometimes when I'm out and about giving one of my talks people ask me what goes on in the
Jewel House late at night after all the visitors have gone home. And here, just for you is a
sneaky peek!
Most days you will find me here at Hampton Court Palace, this is where my office is, it is up a
spiral staircase of 51 steps off the chapel court, it is the world's best office. I wonder if anyone
is going to be brave enough, looking at that slide, to take a guess at the number of rooms in
Hampton Court Palace? Do call out your suggestions if you have any.
FLOOR: 580?
Do I have any advances on 580? A thousand I heard, going in the right direction. But to save
time I shall reveal that the answer is 1324. That does include some quite large cupboards, I
must admit. We also look after Kew Palace in Kew Gardens and also the Banqueting House in
Whitehall, which is the last surviving fragment of the great, lost Tudor Stuart palace of
Whitehall. And our fifth site is the State Apartments at Kensington Palace. That is really
where I'm going to start talking about the Georgian Court. And my way into tonight's subject
is going to be through this painting on the king's grand staircase at Kensington Palace.
It was completed in 1726 by William Kent and the extraordinary thing about the painting, to
my mind, is the way that it includes, it is my belief that it includes 45 different portraits of
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people who lived and worked at the court of George I and George II. All of these people that
you can see on the walls and there is more of them on the ceiling, I think that they are real
people. Each one of them has a story to tell. When I first started working at Kensington
Palace, as a curator, I remember I would talk to my colleagues and say talk me through the
who's who of the staircase. They would say, yes of course, I would be glad to, the lady with
the red feather; she is the mistress of George I. But then another curator would come up and
say, no, no, no, the lady with the blue scarf she is the mistress of George I. And then
somebody else would come along and say, oh, no, no, no, it is the lady in green and actually
he had three mistresses anyway. It turned out that there was an awful lot of confusion and
debate. One day I remember thinking, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. I sat down with
all the guide books to Kensington Palace, that do go right back to the 1750s. So they go right
back into the eighteenth century and I thought I will just work it all out, I will probably be
done by teatime. It took me six years. And I still haven't identified everybody in that staircase
group portrait by any means at all. I ended up writing a whole book about it, I got that
obsessed with this research project. It makes a lovely gift, by the way, should you be thinking
of any of your friends' birthdays coming up soon.
Anyway, to guide you through all of this I have chosen to talk about really one key figure
tonight, Queen Caroline. Who knew all of these people who were depicted on the staircase
and I'm going to tell you who a few of them are along the way. And I think that Queen
Caroline is just brilliant, she's my favourite Queen, I think that we can see her as the
cleverest, and the funniest and also the fattest Queen consort that we have ever had in
Britain! Of course her story doesn't start anywhere near Kensington Palace at all.
She was born in Germany, in Ansbach in 1683, a small state in southern Germany. And her
father, the Prince died when she was only three years old. She was orphaned quite young.
And the young Caroline was sent to live with richer, grander relatives, she was sent to live at
the court of the Elector of Brandenburg based in Berlin.
Now, eighteenth-century Germany wasn't a single country, it was split up into all of these
little electorates, as they were called, and each Elector, or Electoral Prince, had the power to
cast a vote in the election of their overlord, who was the holy Roman Emperor. So the
Elector of Berlin runs the court where Caroline grew up, and his wife had a brother who was
the Elector of Hanover. We are getting into connections with Britain here, aren't we? The
Elector of Hanover that I'm talking about here, being the future King George I of Great
Britain.
So Caroline growing up in Berlin is placed upon the marriage market for Princesses. Despite
not having a lack, a huge dowry she was quite a catch, and that's because of her sparkling
intelligence and her beauty. She was part of a very German tradition of lively, sparkling,
intellectual royal women. It's quite at odds with the British tradition where we get princesses
like Mary and Anne in a similar period who are not well educated, it has to be said. But in
Germany Caroline was taking lessons in philosophy, in mathematics, she was corresponding
with people like Leibniz and she wowed the Princely courts of Germany with her brain
power.
She was wooed by the future King of Spain, very good offer which she turned down, and
that's because she didn't want to become a Catholic, which would have been necessary. She
would remain a lifelong religious radical. She wasn't big on the sort of outward trappings of
the church. She sort of had a mystical tone to her religious views. And then she was wooed
again, for a second time, by this man, then he was merely the son of the Elector of the dinky
little state of Hanover. But he would become, one day, our King George II of Great Britain.
He was born in exactly the same year as Hanover.
The best known sort of pub quiz fact about George II is the fact that he was the last British
king to lead the troops in person on the battlefield. You might have heard that. He was a
rather good soldier. He was fiery, he was dictatorial, and he liked bossing people around. It
has to be said though that when he became the constitutional ruler of Great Britain, he would
require tact and subtlety and finesse. And none of these things did he possess.
His courtship of Caroline was a suitably fiery matter. This is from one of his letters. “I desire
nothing so much as to throw myself at my Princess' feet and promise her eternal devotion".
Well that worked, it might work on me actually! She accepted him, and in the year 1705 they
went to live here at the Palace of Herrenhausen, still there in its wonderful, wonderful
baroque gardens just outside the city of Hanover. But now Caroline has to deal with her new
father‑in‑law. The future King George I, then still Georg Ludwig Elector of Hanover.
He was quite a shy man, a devious man. Because of his retiring nature, even at the time
people didn't really feel like they had been able to get to know him. He was a bit mysterious.
And one result of that is that gossip has filled in the gaps about George I, and he has
developed a sort of reputation as a deviant sexual athlete, I'm sorry to say. This is Lord
Chesterfield, the British courtier on King George I, "he would reject no woman if she were
very willing, very fat and had great breasts..." The result of this, according to Lord
Chesterfield was that if you were a candidate for the position of royal mistress you needed to
eat a lot, you needed to put on weight. Some of them, strained and swelled to put on weight,
some succeeded and others burst! Now I have to tell you that this rather scurrilous line on
George I is quite typical of the British courtiers, he wasn't warmly welcomed when he came
to Britain. There was quite a lot of xenophobia and unwillingness, I think, to get to know, get
to like this new German king. He did live almost monogamously, in later life at least, with his
single mistress who was very skinny. She ended up living at Kensington Palace.
But there was a genuine sexual scandal in George's past that is the mystery of what happened
to his wife. In the 1690s George's wife embarked upon a flagrant and adulterous relationship
with a Swede, Count Königsmarck, and they weren't discreet and letters got out and George
was humiliated. We hear that he took quite decisive action about this. This is the palace in
central Hanover on the banks of the river Leine, the Leine Palace it's called.
The story goes that one night in the palace Count Königsmarck was making his way through
the corridors to go and see George's wife in her room when he was set upon by an assassin
employed by the jealous husband, and this is the spot ladies and gentlemen, in the river,
where his body is said to have been thrown! When I tell you that this story comes from
Horace Walpole, those of you who are familiar with the eighteenth century will appreciate
that he is a bit of a story‑teller, we can't always believe what he says. But it is undeniably true
that in the 1690s George divorced his wife on the grounds of adultery, and he imprisoned her
for the rest of her life in a remote German castle. The dark side of all of this is that they had a
son, the future George II, who was 11‑years‑old at this time, and when he was parted from
his mother he never saw her again after that. Even though she lived for 33 more years. It
doesn't, it is very easy to speculate that this is one of the causes of the famously bad feeling
between the generations of the Georgian Royal Family, particularly George I and George II.
So in 1714 this quiet life in Hanover, for the Hanoverians is turned upside down because
Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, I don't know if you can make the chart out it's a bit small,
but here she is, Queen Anne, last of the Stuarts dies with no surviving children, that is despite
having gone through 17 pregnancies, in a desperate attempt to produce an heir to the Stuart
line, poor woman. And now, there was a problem for the Protestant aristocracy of Britain.
They decided to look back up the Stuart family tree in search of another branch of the family
to take over as sovereign. And at this point, famously, every school child knows this, they
passed over 50 nearer blood relatives of Queen Anne's, 50 of them on the grounds that
progressively but unacceptably they were Catholics, only Protestants need apply for this
particular job. So they looked right back up to James I, and they saw through James I’s
daughter, Elizabeth, the Winter Queen, this branch of the family here, these are her
descendants, they are the Electors of Hanover, that is why in 1714 they get invited over to
Britain to take the throne as King George, Prince George and Caroline now Princess of
Wales. And invited is the key to all of this, this lot are not royal by right of blood, but they
are royal by the invitation of parliament. They knew that parliament could sack them.
Parliament placed various restrictions on their rule. I think they saw this lot as a sort of pet
Royal Family, and they wanted to divide and rule to keep them in their box, to not let them
get too powerful. So the politicians embarked upon a course of stirring up trouble, further
trouble between the generations here. If you couldn't get a job at the court of the king, well
then you would go and try and get a job at the court of his son, the Prince. This is called the
"reversionary principle". All officers in the eighteenth century court will revert to a future
generation of holders. The reversionary interest, this problem of going to the next generation
runs throughout eighteenth-century politics. George III hates George IV, if you remember
looking 100 years ahead.
So the Hanoverians come over to live at St James's Palace. Here in 1717 poor old Caroline,
our heroine, really gets sucked into this feuding and bad feeling. In 1717 a particularly
ludicrous court quarrel breaks out that is known as "the christening quarrel". It happened
because the new German Royal Family couldn't speak English particularly well. Now you can't
blame them for this. They spoke French, they spoke German, they spoke Italian, they spoke
Latin, English is pretty low down the list for the international courts of Europe. And Caroline
had just given birth to a little baby, a little baby called George. At this baby's christening in her
bedchamber there was a gate‑crasher, the gate‑crasher was the Duke of Newcastle, a
prominent courtier of the king's, and they didn't want him there. Caroline's husband, the
Prince of Wales, said to the Duke of Newcastle, "You are a rascal, I will find you later," and
the implication is I will find you later to give you a piece of my mind, I didn't want you at my
son's christening. But unfortunately because of that thick German accent, what the Duke of
Newcastle actually heard was, "you rascal, I will fight you", he took this as an invitation to a
dual, a dreadful breach of court etiquette. So now the Duke of Newcastle goes running off to
the king and he says, "your son challenged me to a dual, what are you going to I do about
that?". And because of the background of bad feeling between the father and the son, George
I now ejects his son and his daughter in law, George and Caroline out on to the streets, he
throws them out of St James's Palace.
This is embarrassing and it's inconvenient, but what is worse is that he keeps behind their
children, his grandchildren, the next generation of the family. Now these are Caroline's
children and numbers one to five are alive by 1717. Frederick the eldest has effectively been
lost to her because he was left behind in Hanover to be the family's representative there.
Then she had her three little girls, Anne, Amelia and Caroline, and then there was this baby
boy, these four children she was forced to leave behind in the care of the king. This is very
traumatic for her, we hear that as she said goodbye to her girls she fell into one faint after
another. This is just farcical and ludicrous, but then it gets nasty, because little George, little
baby George is not given the proper medical treatment and he dies. And in the national
archives there is an account for a pitiful little square of black velvet, just big enough to cover
up his coffin. So he's been taken from his mother, and she believes that he has been killed. So
for George I, this was a problem, I think everybody looked at what he had done and said that
was cruel.
The Court at this point split very clearly into these two very distinct and rival camps. The
older and more respectable and the more established courtiers tended to go with the king
and support him, but all the younger and the more ambitious courtiers went instead to the
parties of the Prince and Princess of Wales. And it has to be said their parties of the Prince
and Princess of Wales were much better than those of the King. At the Prince of Wales'
parties people had so much fun that some virgins conceived!
Now the reason I have gone into this court quarrel in such detail is because it explains the
rebuilding of Kensington Palace as we see it today. Kensington Palace was originally put up in
the 1690s by Sir Christopher Wren for William and Mary. But the job was done too quickly,
it was rushed and by the time George I inherited in 1714 it was falling down. I believe it was
the christening quarrel and his awareness that he'd lost so much popularity that forced him
now to think I need to do something about this, I need to rebuild Kensington Palace, to
create a better stage on which to perform better parties, parties to win back all the power
and popularity that I've lost because my son's parties are better than mine.
Now what was I talking about when I discussed these court parties? They were held in the
evening, they were called Drawing Rooms. And often when people come to visit the State
Apartments at Kensington they wonder why there are no chairs, and the answer is because
when the courtiers were at the palace there's no room for any chairs, look, they really are
jammed in shoulder‑to‑shoulder. Also it was contrary to etiquette to sit down in the royal
presence, and etiquette is a very important part of court life. You must not break these
unwritten social rules that I am going to explain a little bit. Now all the great and the good of
Georgian London would come to these parties. Because they were exclusive events, people
used to queue up outside to watch them arriving. You can imagine a film premier type set‑up;
all the beauties would come in their jewels to go up into the court. If you didn't have the
entrée, well the atmosphere was just wonderfully addictive. People talk about how the court
was full of politicks and anger and friendship and love and two things beginning with "f" that I
won't mention.
The court formed itself into factions which are political but they are also social and some
people call them fuctions! Now if you were a lady member of the court coming here for a
party in the Cupola Room at Kensington Palace you had to wear the court uniform. And
that's essentially one of these dresses called the mantua, this one's actually from the 1760s but
it is the most sparkly in our collection, the oxygen has never tarnished the silver lace on this
one.
They spread out sideways over these immensely wide hoops in which you can do essentially
nothing, apart from stand around looking elegant. When the court ladies walked you can see
the dress is very wide but not very deep, so they had to take tiny little steps and they are
described as looking as if they are rolling about on wheels! If you were a new court lady then
you would train with your dancing master about how to stand, rules like never crossing your
arms, never turning your back on the King and Queen. If you wanted to leave the Royal
presence, you had to get permission, curtsy three times and then back out the door. Imagine
negotiating that through a door that's behind you, a little bit tricky.
What our visitors always want to know is how did the ladies go to the loo. And the answer is
this lovely device here.
This is called the borderloo, it is like a gravy boat. Eighteenth-century ladies are not wearing
knickers or drawers, not yet invented, and you could see how this would work, you slip it up
under your hooped skirt and nobody would know what was going on. However you were
supposed to go to the ante room before using one of these. That did require asking
permission, which was not necessarily forth coming. Once one of Caroline's ladies asked for
permission, was refused and a few minutes later, this is the contemporary quotation actually,
"a puddle appeared from underneath her skirts," and these are the actual words, "threatened
the shoes of bystanders!" I think this is a very strange ritualised world, where you must follow
the rules and if you don't you will be humiliated.
Now to decorate these new party rooms at Kensington Palace, the old king appointed this
young man, William Kent. You can't help but like William Kent, he's such a bubbly extrovert
character. His friends described him as being "very fat and very hot"; he was famously able to
drink 12 bottles of wine in a sitting. I think you can see some of his self‑confidence and
extroversion in the fact that he has included a self‑portrait on the ceiling of the King's Grand
Staircase at Kensington Palace. And this is said to be his mistress, a Shakespearean actress
whispering into his ear there. He was a surprise choice; he shouldn't have really had the job at
all. Everybody expected that the work would go to Sir James Thornhill, who had sort of
become the established painter to the monarchy. He had done St Paul's Cathedral; he had
done the Painted Hall at Greenwich. The mistake he made now is that he charged too much.
He put in a great big quotation and George I liked a bargain, he decided to try the new guy.
William Kent was just fresh back from his training in Rome. He would take this plump Royal
Commission and run with it. It was the start of great things for William Kent, as you know he
would create the distinctive look of the Georgian age. Specifically for Caroline he would go
on to create various extraordinary grottos and other structures in what would become the
Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. For her he would restore Rubens' ceiling in the Banqueting
House at Whitehall, major conservation work that he undertook. And also for Caroline he
built this wonderful, beautiful library at St James's Palace, sadly now lost, in which she stored
her collection of 3,000 books, that's a lot of books in the eighteenth century. She was a
terrific book worm.
Now to complete his work at Kensington Palace, William Kent now invited various colourful,
pretty, exotic‑looking members of the Royal household to sit as his subjects, and perhaps
most extraordinary amongst them is Mohammed, this is Mohammed the Turkish valet.
Mohammed was born in Ottoman, Greece, he was born when it was part of the Ottoman
empire, and so he was born a Muslim. In his early years he was captured by soldiers from the
Christian Hapsburg Empire and he was taken by them back to Germany. He ended up living in
Hanover, where he converted to Christianity, he got married. Can you see he's got his arm
around this lady's shoulder, we presume that she's perhaps Mohammed's wife, who was the
daughter of a Hanoverian brewer.
There in Hanover Mohammed entered the service of Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, as a
body servant, he helped the Elector of Hanover to dress in the morning, he undressed him at
night. This is a very intimate position. He even treated Georg's haemorrhoids, we hear. In
1714 when Georg became George I, Mohammed too came over to London and ended up
living and working at Kensington Palace. Although he had low status, he was just a body
servant, of course he had this terrific access and was enormously powerful, unofficially, and
that is why we have multiple portraits of him. That is why too the English courtiers got
jealous, quite predictably. They put it around that Mohammed was a very bad thing and that
the king keeps his exotic Turk for abominable uses.
Elsewhere in the painting we have a milliner; this lady here is Mrs Elizabeth Tempest, who was
the personal milliner to Princess Caroline. She's wearing here a very fashionable, expensive
item of headgear, a French lace hood, and if you go to the royal archives you can see the
enormous sums of money that Caroline would pay to Mrs Tempest for this kind of thing.
This little boy here in the foreground here in the blue suit, he's a page boy who worked for
another courtier we're going to hear a lot about, Henrietta Howard, who was Princess and
then Queen Caroline's Woman of the Bedchamber, helped her to get dressed.
Now, in 1727 William Kent had just finished this new party palace for George I, but poor old
George I died, he never actually got the benefit of it. That went to his hated son and daughter
‑in‑law, now George II and Queen Caroline. They ascended the throne together at the age
of 44. And Caroline, as she entered middle‑age was putting on weight, it has to be said. But
this made her look spectacular. When she came into the drawing room at Kensington Palace
wearing a pink silk dress and surrounded by all of her Ladies‑in‑Waiting and her maids of
honour, there is one description of this overwhelming sight. Queen Caroline looked,
"superior to her waiting nymphs, as lobster to attendant shrimps." Now Caroline, despite her
many excellent qualities did not go down all that well with the British courtiers, it had to be
said. They found that her interest in philosophy, in radical religion, in collecting books, in
collecting antique and natural artefacts was socially inappropriate; they weren't used to royal
women doing this kind of thing.
One of the wonderful little vignettes we have from when Caroline moved into Kensington
Palace as Queen is this story that she opened up a bureau in one of the closets and she
discovered there all the drawings of Hans Holbein, so she came face to face with the
courtiers of Henry VIII, loved these pictures, cherished them and made them much better
known, made them the absolute core, as they remain of the Royal Collection.
Now because Caroline was so clearly more intelligent than her husband, a lot of people
considered that she wore the trousers in the relationship when it came to politics and the
appointment of bishops and all that sort of thing. Sir Robert Walpole, who was still Prime
Minister, he put it about that he had the right sow by the ear in his rather nasty phrase. He
said that it was Queen Caroline that you should go to, as he did, if he wanted anything done.
And this rather bawdy caricature here reflects this popular image of Caroline as the powerful
string puller. Here George II is a satyr, that is a creature that lacks consciousness, it is out of
control, and it is also a nod to the fact that he too suffered from the haemorrhoids, just like
his father did. And Caroline here is shown as a wizardess, a female magician. And you can see
here that the King is accidentally kicking this character here, whose his Prime Minister, Sir
Robert Walpole, and what Caroline is doing is injecting a magic enema up his backside in
order to bring him back under control. I apologise for the images, it is the Georgians, not me!
She may have had this political power but she did not have a monopoly over her husband's
emotions. And that's because a lot of the time he was off with his mistress, and this mistress,
a very long‑term mistress of his was also Caroline's servant, it was Henrietta Howard, her
very own Woman of the Bedchamber. So Henrietta Howard, her job title is Woman of the
Bedchamber to the Queen, but at the same time she's technically Woman of the Bedchamber
to the King as well! Very humiliating for Caroline, who was a proud woman. She put it about
that she minded her husband's infidelities, no more than his going to the close stool. That is
what she said, but in fact, if you read accounts of Caroline and her daily behaviour, you can
see she dislikes this, it did cause her pain. That pain was witnessed by her closest servants.
Who were they? Well, Caroline's most devoted servant of all was John Hervey, he was the
Vice Chamberlain of her court which is quite fortuitous because he was a man with many
vices. Today he would be called her gay best friend, I think. And every morning, Hervey, who
was a very scurrilous, gossipy, witty, eloquent person, he would go in and he would entertain
her with stories about what was going on at court. And despite all of the vices, John Hervey
was a wonderful, wonderful writer, that was his great redeeming quality. He was such a
curious character that even at the time people said that, "this world consists of men, women
and Herveys." If you go to Suffolk record office there are books and books, volumes and
volumes of his memoirs, that is how we know so much about the goings on at the court of
George II and Caroline, it's because Hervey wrote them all down.
Another of Caroline's favoured servants was this very curious character here, Peter the Wild
Boy. We are looking again at his portrait on the staircase, in the green suit with the very, very
curly hair. He was at court as a sort of human pet. He was originally a feral child, he'd been
found living in the woods of Hanover, all alone. And he didn't have any language, he had no
human skills, he wore no clothes and he was eating acorns and other leaves that he could
find. And he became a great curiosity. He came to court because of the sort of curious
questions that he posed. Questions actually which were central to the enlightenment then in
progress. What does it mean to be a human being? Peter the Wild Boy has no speech, does
that mean he's a human being, or is he just an animal, does he have a soul? These are the
kinds of debates that he sparked off amongst the courtiers of London. And he appeared in all
the newspapers. You could go and see a waxwork of Peter the Wild Boy, that was displayed
in the Strand, and if you were the right social status you could go to court and see him,
examine him for himself. He was put into the care of Dr John Arbuthnot, also depicted next
to Peter on the staircase. He had been Queen Anne's medical doctor as well as a great writer
and satirist. And he tried to teach Peter how to speak. It is quite distressing to read what they
did to teach Peter to speak. Because according to eighteenth century educational theory they
used a broad leather strap to try to beat it into him. When you consider that probably Peter
the Wild Boy had an autistic condition, he had learning difficulties, I believe, you can see that
this is never going to work, and you can feel very sorry indeed for the wild boy. But Caroline
nevertheless paid for him to be looked after and treasured him.
The third of her servants I want to talk about is another Peter, Peter Wentworth, we don't
have a portrait of Peter Wentworth, but he was one of her equerries. And that meant his job
was to walk with the Queen when she came out of her private apartments and to travel with
her in her carriage. So they spent a lot of time together actually. Peter Wentworth was very
glad to get this job because although he'd been at court for an awfully long time, he wasn't
getting anywhere in his career. That is because he was terribly shy and the cure for his
shyness unfortunately came in a bottle. In the British Library we have Peter Wentworth's
letters to his brother, and I think his colleagues would have been amazed to see how witty
and eloquent he is on paper as opposed to in person. In one of these letters he describes
how Queen Caroline actually gave him a wonderful gift, the gift of her attention when they
were travelling together. And as it says here, "her Majesty has said," he writes," she pities me
from her soul and that I deserve a better fortune." As a result of all of this he became
resolved, "never to be concerned in liquor again", she dries him out, she sends him to
rehabilitation effectively. That's why she has very passionate friends and supporters amongst
her servants, and she needed them because as she entered her second decade as Queen, as
we go into the 1730s Caroline's life became very difficult indeed. Her husband's affair with
Henrietta caused her more and more pain and humiliation, he treated her worse and worse.
Now what about Henrietta Howard then, this mistress, what did she think about it all? Well,
contrary to what you might expect, I believe that she too disliked and felt degraded by her
relationship with the King. I would argue that there is a bit of a strange alliance actually
between Caroline and Henrietta, the wife and the mistress, together them managing this
difficult, middle‑aged man, the King. Henrietta was not a sort of va‑va‑voom sort of royal
mistress at all. This is a description offered by Alexander Pope, he said that she had, "a
grievous air of sadness about her." He accused her of, "not loving herself so well as she does
her friends.". It is not surprising she had this air of sadness, like Caroline she had been
orphaned young, and at 16 Henrietta Howard, she was in a difficult position, she was a gentile
pauper, she felt she ought to aspire to a certain standard of living but she didn't have the
family money to support it. She felt she had to get married. She married a man called Charles
Howard, terrible mistake. He turned out to be, here is the contemporary description, "a
drunken, extravagant, brutal reprobate," he beats her, he took her money. The reason she
was at court at all was because there she was safe from him. He couldn't enter the precincts
of the palace in order to get at her any more.
Once she had entered the service of Caroline as a Bedchamber Woman, she subsequently
found it impossible when George decided that she would make a good mistress. This wasn't
very scandalous, everyone expected he would have a mistress, and they were glad that he'd
chosen an English one, because they felt it would at least improve his English language skills.
But Henrietta's husband went on causing her trouble. And again in the British Library there is
a wonderful, wonderful testimony from Henrietta giving her thoughts on marriage. She knew
that in eighteenth century law she had no remedy, there was no way that she could leave him
with the support of the world. But as she writes in her private diary, "I must believe I'm free",
she says, "it is not right he treats me in this way." And in 1728 Henrietta did succeed in
persuading her nasty violent husband to sign a formal deed of separation. Very unusual for
their social class and time. But this freedom came at a very high price, because he, of course,
got custody of their only child. And Henrietta would never see her son again. So she and
Caroline actually had this in common, they both had their children taken from them.
Now then, this is the man about which they both danced attendance, George II in old age.
This is a detail of a picture where he's actually painted on the King's Grand Staircase, and this
is my favourite portrait of him because the painter here is said to have done a lightning sketch
when the King was unaware. And it does have a sort of relaxed informal quality to it. We
hear that in his famous temper tantrums, George II when he used to get so cross he would
kick his hat and even his wig all around the room. He had what we call "anger management
issues", later on in life it is true to say that he mellowed.
To my mind he really redeemed himself in 1737 when he reveals to us how much, underneath
it all, he really did love his wife Caroline. What happened in 1737? Well she fell ill, and here
is a sketch of Caroline lying in her bed at St James's Palace. Caroline, but it was a mystery
what her illness was. She'd suffered gynaecological problems. All of her eight deliveries of
children had been difficult. And made no less stressful by the need to have her husband, the
Archbishop of Canterbury and 18 other courtiers in the room each time. But she had always
placed great faith in doctors and in science. She was one of the first westerners to have her
own children inoculated against the dreadful disease of small pox, for example. Now if you
are squeamish don't look at this next slide, it's really horrible, this is what small pox looks
like, and the idea of injecting a child with a tiny bit of small pox in order to bring on a
hopefully mild bout of the disease and to build up immunity.
This idea was known by the Turks, it was brought back to London by Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, who was the wife of the ambassador to Constantinople. And Caroline looked at
this, she assessed the evidence and felt that it was a good idea. She had her own youngest
children, the little girls shown here, inoculated. This caused an uproar. People said this is
counterintuitive, why would I make my child ill, but if the Queen did it people thought there
must be something in it. This was a great blow in support of the enlightenment, in support of
science as opposed to superstition.
After the birth of this little girl here, Louisa, the youngest of them all, Caroline had actually
been suffering for ten years by the time this all came to a head from a secret umbilical hernia,
or a hole that had opened up in the walls of her stomach. And the reason we hear so much
about Caroline's weight in the eighteenth century is partly because, I think, it would have
been agonising for her, with this condition, to wear stays, those tight corset‑like things that
suck in court ladies. We never see Henrietta Howard buying Caroline's stays in the clothing
accounts that she had to keep as her official dresser. And in 1837 what happened was, that a
little loop of Caroline's bowels or intestines popped out through the hole like that.
Now what her doctors ought to have done is push it back in and sew up the hole, instead
what they did I'm afraid, it was a terrible error, is cut it off. And then for the next nine days
they went on cutting off a little bit more, completely destroying Caroline's digestive system,
as her bowels became mortified, that is the term that they use. Throughout all of this
Caroline kept up her spirits, she would crack jokes with the doctor when he came in. She
would say each morning, "Aah, Dr. Ranby, just pretend you are cutting up your ex-wife who
you hate," in order to give him courage to operate upon her. So for nine days then she lingers
on, in this terrible condition with her bowels half in half out. And George II, her husband,
amazed everybody by devoting himself from this point on entirely to her care, he had nothing
else on his mind at all. He was in her room constantly. Finally on the tenth day there was
some sort of an explosion inside and this is what Alexander Pope again has to say about it.
"Here lies wrapt up in 40,000 towels the only proof that Caroline had bowels". This is partly a
medical description of what happened, but he's hinting here as well at this idea that a Queen
should never be sick, she is somehow above bodily needs and wants. And that definitely
delayed the medical treatment. The doctors at first weren't able, she didn't want them, they
felt it impossible to examine her soon enough to do anything about her condition. After all of
this she seemed near to death's door and throughout all of this her only concern had been for
the grief of her husband and her children.
On the very last day she had a very famous well‑recorded conversation with her husband.
She said please marry again after I'm gone, and he said, no, I won't do that. He said I will take
mistresses, the implication is the mistresses meant nothing to him. He said he would never
take a second Queen. When finally she did die they were hand in hand, they were reconciled
at last. Now Caroline's chaplain, Dr Clarke, summed up the views of everybody at court
when he said that, "her softness of behaviour and command of herself did not fail her even in
the hour of death." For this Queen of the enlightenment who supported science it is horribly
ironic, isn't it, that she was killed by her doctors.
George II was completely prostrate, so too was John Hervey, her friend remember, and I say
friend advisedly, because they seemed to have such a strong relationship that it vaulted the
chasms between them, between English and German, female and male, royalty and
commoner, and here is the epitaph that he wrote for her, "sure in sleep no dullness you need
fear." I think that what they had in common is very considerable lives that were bored and
blunted by court life. Here he is suggesting that in heaven she will be cracking jokes and
talking to philosophers and doing the things that she wanted to do.
What about Peter Wentworth the drunken equerry? Well he too was stricken by the
Queen's death, he had the shell of shyness that I mentioned that had been shattered by
Caroline alone. As he'd written, "I swear by all the Gods if it had not been for the Queen's
extreme goodness to me, my heart had been broak". Unfortunately his heart now was broken
and the only cure for a broken heart would seem to Peter Wentworth to be found at the
bottom of a bumper of Burgundy, he died of alcoholism very soon afterwards.
What happened to Peter Wild Boy third of the three? Well after her death nobody at court
really wanted him anymore, he was sent to go and live on a farm in Berkhamsted, just north
of London. And here he was made to wear this iron collar, on display at Kensington Palace at
the moment. For me it sums up the mixture of affection and cruelty with which he was
treated by his contemporaries. At first it looks like a torture object doesn't it, because you
can see where it would have been locked around his neck. But it was also made with a kind
thought, because Peter had a habit of wandering off from the farm. Once he even got as far as
Norwich from Berkhamsted. People would always bring him home again, because on the front
of the collar is his name and address. I don't know if you can make this out, it says Peter the
Wild Man from Hanover, if found please return to Farmer Fenn at Berkhamsted, and you will
be repaid for your trouble. And he was a very gentle soul was Peter. He lived on into old age.
Here he is.
We don't know how old because we don't know when he was born. He never learned to
speak and we hear about his very simple pleasures, he loved to watch a fire burning. He loved
to go out at night and look at the stars. And the only time we hear that he was in distress was
in the autumn when the change to the seasons would make him unhappy and he would go off
into the woods in search of acorns, perhaps as a reminder of his youth. When Peter died he
was buried at Berkhamsted, and he was so well loved by the people of Berkhamsted that they
got him this gravestone.
I don't know if you can make it out but it says on it, "Peter the Wild Boy 1785". The first time
I went to visit his grave I noticed there were flowers on it. This is a real tradition in
Berkhamsted. I went into the church there and asked the flower ladies if it was an official
parish thing and they said no, people are always leaving flowers for Peter, because people
here think, and this moved me, the lady said people here think that he should be
remembered, and so he should, shouldn't he, poor old Peter.
Now after Caroline's death in 1737, it was a bit of the beginning of the end of the high life at
Kensington Palace. George II was not so good at hosting court occasions without her. In 1760
he himself died at Kensington Palace of a heart attack. While on the toilet actually, just like
Elvis! And the next King, George III, preferred to live elsewhere, here at Buckingham Palace,
amongst other places, and Kensington Palace became a sort of run down, ramshackle
retirement home for minor members of the Royal Family. Here's a last look at the King's
Grand Staircase as it was in 1819.
And I think here we can see early visitors, tourists coming up the stairs for this lady here,
who might be a housekeeper to look around the palace and I think that she's saying to them,
here is Peter the Wild Boy and here is Mohammed the valet, and she's starting that process of
mixing it all up and confusing it all.
Now this year, of the painting here from the Pine's Royal Residencies in 1819, that is actually
a very significant year in Kensington Palace, because in that year a new palace resident was
born, in the palace drawing room, a great, great‑granddaughter of Caroline's, who would
inherit something of her spirit, she was just an insignificant‑looking little baby Princess but her
name was Victoria. She would inherit the throne but that is a story for another day. Thanks
for listening.