In Bed with the Georgians Read online

  All that was in the future when George ascended the British throne, but it explains why, when he first set foot on English soil on 18 September 1714 George brought with him two women who quickly became known by the nick-names of ‘The Maypole’ and ‘The Elephant’. The ‘Maypole’ was his somewhat scrawny and wafer-thin maîtresseen-titre – his official mistress, by whom he had three illegitimate children. They had met when she became a maid of honour to George’s mother Sophia, the Electress of Hanover, in 1691.The ‘Elephant’ was Sophia von Kielmansegg, mentioned earlier as possibly being his illegitimate half-sister. The royal family denied vehemently that George slept with Sophia, but as far as the British public were concerned both The Maypole and The Elephant were royal mistresses, and stories were rife about the goings-on in the Royal household. As to the Elephant, Horace Walpole recalled:

  …being terrified at her enormous figure… Two fierce black eyes, large and rolling beneath two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck that overflowed and was not distinguished from the lower part of her body, and no part restrained by stays; no wonder that a child dreaded such an ogress, and that the mob of London were highly diverted at the importation of so uncommon a seraglio! … indeed nothing could be grosser than the ribaldry that was vomited out in lampoons, libels, and every channel of abuse, against the sovereign and the new court, and chaunted even in their hearing about the public streets.

  Sophia was the complete opposite of the willowy Maypole, who Horace Walpole termed ‘long and emaciated.’

  George was known to have a propensity for large women, or, as Lord Chesterfield put it: ‘No woman was amiss if she was but very willing, very fat and had great breasts!’ That still leaves the question: whatever did George see in the Maypole? The Maypole, more correctly styled Ehrengard Melusine von der Schulenburg, was loathed by the English court. She was hated for being dull and stupid, for having appalling dresssense, for being avaricious, and for condoning incest (i.e. because it was believed that she shared the King’s bed with his half-sister). She must have had something going for her though, since the King kept her as his mistress for almost forty years, and during that time she became an invaluable intermediary between the King and his Ministers. She grew rich on the sale of appointments, and incurred the wrath of Grub Street hacks who resented her meddling in British politics. As Robert Walpole remarked, she was ‘as much Queen of England as any ever was, … he [George I] did everything by her.’ Above all though, she and The Elephant were closely linked with the scandal of the stock market crash in 1720 known as ‘The South Sea Bubble’.

  Both women appeared to have shared a common link – neither of them had enough money. In the case of Melusine she had her ‘three nieces’ to bring up and educate – they were in fact her illegitimate children by George, but he never acknowledged them nor contributed significantly to the cost of their upbringing. In 1719 she had been given the title of Duchess of Kendal, and she needed to maintain appearances appropriate to her status. Meanwhile, Sophia was a widow bringing up five children – in a country where the cost of living was far higher than in her native Hanover, and where keeping up a lavish lifestyle, appropriate to what she saw as her entitlement, was extremely expensive. Both women were happy to be the recipient of bribes in the form of South Sea Company stock to the value of £15,000. In addition, two of Melusine’s ‘nieces’ each received shares to the value of £5,000.

  The South Sea Company entered into a guarantee with Melusine and Sophia that £120 would be paid for every point the stock price rose above £154. In 1719 the South Sea company had sought permission to convert some thirty million pounds of the British National Debt. Up until that time government bonds were not readily tradeable because there were problems redeeming the bonds, which were often for very large amounts which could not be sub-divided. The South Sea Company hit upon a clever wheeze whereby they would convert these un-wieldy, untradable bonds into low-interest, readily tradable bonds, and they set about bribing half the cabinet, including both Lord Stanhope and Lord Sunderland, to gain support for the scheme.

  The Elephant and The Maypole were enthusiastic supporters of the proposal – small wonder since they had a vested interest in the success of the venture. Stock, which had stood at £128 in January 1720, was being valued at £550 when Parliament accepted the scheme in May. The price had climbed to £1,000 by August, before the crash caused the stock to plummet to £150 by the end of September. Many wealthy families became impoverished overnight. It was rumoured that the King had received payments from the Company, having been made a Governor of it in 1718. In the aftermath of the crash it became apparent that vast bribes had been paid to prominent people at Court, and both Sophia and Melusine were named in the House of Lords during a debate on the subject of bribery and corruption. Indeed the pair of them were most fortunate that Robert Walpole, entrusted with responsibility for clearing up the mess, shielded both the King and his royal appurtenances from the risk of prosecution.

  Caricatures appeared, suggesting that the Duchess of Kendal had helped Robert Knight, the Treasurer of the South Sea Company, to escape abroad. More ridicule followed with the publication of packs of ‘Bubble’ playing cards, while a young William Hogarth produced his first satirical engraving The South Sea Scheme in 1721.

  The Elephant, aka Sophia, was created the Countess of Leinster in 1721, becoming the Countess of Darlington and Baroness Brentford a year later. She died in 1725 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Melusine, who went by the nick-name of ‘the Scarecrow’ in Germany and ‘the Goose’ in Scotland, died in 1743.

  King George, then aged 65, had moved on to a new mistress – his first English one – a woman by the name of Anna Brett. Horace Walpole refers to her as being ‘very handsome, but dark enough by her eyes, complexion, and hair, for a Spanish beauty.’ The aristocracy was horrified to hear the rumour that she was to be elevated to the rank of Countess, since Mistress Brett (as she was derogatively called) was the daughter of a mere colonel with an infamous mother. No sooner had she started throwing her weight about at the Palace, making alterations and rubbing up the Maypole the wrong way, than news of the death of the King came through. She never did get her hands on a ducal coronet, and she disappeared from court and into obscurity.

  The love-life of George I was to find echoes in subsequent generations of the royal family. His contempt and loathing for his wife, his willingness to parade his mistresses in public, his estrangement from his children – all were to be repeated throughout the ensuing century. When George I died, on one of his journeys back to his beloved Hanover, the death was met with a general indifference from the British public. As one newspaper article of the day put it ‘The Devil has caught him by the throat at last’. There was to be no attempt to bring his body back to Britain, and he remains one of the few British monarchs to be buried on foreign soil.

  GEORGE II – two mistresses, a short temper, and a military bore.

  In many ways it was a case of ‘like father, like son’ with the first two Georges. Both had a similar attitude towards fidelity in marriage, both had disastrous relationships with their eldest sons. These were not the only similarities apparent at the time – as the writer Alexander Pope noted in his satirical blast against the decaying spirit of dullness which pervaded the kingdom in his poem The Dunciad:

  Still Dunce the second rules like Dunce the first…

  Hardly the most complimentary reference to the newly-crowned monarch.

  George II had arrived in England, like his father, in 1714 with an entourage which included his wife Caroline and his mistress. The latter was Henrietta Howard, and her story is an interesting illustration of the role and status of ‘the royal mistress.’ Her lot was not exactly a happy one – she had faced a life of genteel poverty after her father had been killed in a duel; she had hoped to find financial security and status by marrying Charles Howard, the younger brother of the Earl of Suffolk, but her husband turned out to be a cruel,
dissolute drunkard, conspicuous for his extravagance and inability to manage money. At 30 years of age, he was fourteen years her senior when she married him. Desperate to find favour at court – and to avoid his creditors – the couple had headed for Hanover in 1713 and had been rewarded by Henrietta being made a Woman of the Bedchamber to Caroline, who shortly afterwards became Princess of Wales. At least that was paid employment, which is more than can be said for her secondary appointment, namely as mistress to the future George II. The man was a monumental bore, endlessly reminiscing about his prowess on the battlefield, and was notoriously short-tempered. No doubt Princess Caroline was delighted to have Henrietta to share the burden of her husband’s company. For her part, Henrietta had the advantage of being somewhat deaf. Apart from that she was charming, intelligent, and very discreet. Jonathan Swift, writing his Character of Mrs Howard in 1727 had this to say about the omni-present ‘wife of the left hand’ (as mistresses were known):

  I shall say nothing of her wit or beauty, which are allowed by all persons who can judge of either, when they hear or see her. Besides, beauty being transient, and a trifle, cannot justly make part of a character. And I leave others to celebrate her wit, because it will be of no use in that part of her character which I intend to draw … from the attendance daily paid her by the ministers, and all expectants, she is reckoned much the greatest favourite of the court at Leicester-house: a situation which she hath long affected to desire that it might not be believed. There is no politician who more carefully watches the motions and dispositions of things and persons at St James’s, nor can form his language with a more imperceptible dexterity to the present posture of a court, or more early foresee what style may be proper upon any approaching juncture of affairs, whereof she can gather early intelligence without asking it, and often when even those from whom she hath it are not sensible that they are giving it to her, but equally with others admire her sagacity. Sir Robert Walpole and she both think they understand each other, and are both equally mistaken.

  In 1728 Mrs Howard managed to obtain a Separation Order from her cruel wastrel of a husband, although this left her totally reliant on the comparative pittance she received from being one of half a dozen Women of the Bedchamber. For twenty years she put up with the boredom linked to her somewhat degrading role as a menial servant, helping Caroline in her ablutions and assisting with her toilette. In the same way she put up with George, not just when he was living as part of his father’s household at St James’s Palace, but later when he moved to Leicester House and set up a rival court. By the time he became George II in 1727 the King seemed to be going through the motions with Henrietta – almost as if convention required him to keep a mistress and to spend the evenings with her. Writing some years later, Horace Walpole described their relationship:

  No established mistress of a sovereign ever enjoyed less of the brilliancy of the situation than Lady Suffolk. Watched and thwarted by the Queen, disclaimed by the minister, she owed to the dignity of her own behaviour, and to the contradiction of her enemies, the chief respect that was paid to her, and which but ill compensated for the slavery of her attendance, and the mortifications she endured. She was elegant; her lover the reverse, and most unentertaining, and void of confidence in her. His motions too were measured by etiquette and the clock. He visited her every evening at nine; but with such dull punctuality, that he frequently walked about his chamber for ten minutes with his watch in his hand, if the stated minute was not arrived.

  Both of them must have found the convention extremely tiresome but it was a further four years before Henrietta could extricate herself from her royal paramour. Her escape came when her brother-in-law the Earl of Suffolk died. Whereas her estranged husband assumed the title of Earl (entitling her to be styled ‘Countess’) the late Earl’s fortune was specifically bequeathed to Henrietta, with not a penny going to her husband. Even better fortune followed when her husband died, leaving her a free woman. Besides, a Countess could not be a mere Woman of the Bedchamber and, in 1731, she was promoted to being Mistress of the Robes. Soon, financial freedom enabled her to escape the cloying atmosphere of the Royal Court, and the public were astonished when she left the King and Queen in her wake and de-camped to Richmond where she built a fine Palladian mansion at Marble Hill. She had previously secured a royal pension of £2,000 a year. To the amazement of the public and amidst much newspaper comment, she married an MP by the name of George Berkeley. The year was 1735 and they enjoyed eleven happy years together before he died aged 57. This left Henrietta with her pension, but not much else, and even that was to end when George II died. Ironically she had ‘bumped into’ the King two days before he died, when her coach passed next to the royal carriage in one of London’s narrow streets. The King stared blankly at her, apparently not even recognizing who she was. Her fortune spent and her royal pension having ended, her last years were spent in considerable poverty before she died in 1767.

  George II’s other acknowledged and official mistress was Amalie Sophie Marianne von Wallmoden, who shared the royal bed from the mid-1730s until the King’s death in 1760. The pair of them feature in an etching dating from 1738 entitled Solomon in his glory held by the British Museum, showing the King sitting legs apart, while his mistress strokes his inner thigh. Amelie was born into a prominent family in Hanover and was described as being ‘very well shaped, not tall, nor low; has no fine features, but very agreeable in the main.’ She married one German, and then took another as a lover, bearing what was widely assumed to be the King’s child in 1736, although he never acknowledged paternity. She was however elevated to the title of the Duchess of Yarmouth.

  In 1739 Samuel Johnson had attacked the King’s relationship in verse:

  His tortured sons shall die before his face

  While he lies melting in a lewd embrace.

  This referred to the schism which had opened up between George II and his son Prince Frederick. Two years earlier Frederick had been banished from St James’s Palace, and had set up a rival court which attracted many of those opposed to the King and his government. The antipathy between father and son was mutual. George II declared: ‘Our first-born is the greatest ass, the greatest liar, the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the whole world, and we heartily wish he were out of it.’ Reflecting on the first time that he met his son’s prospective bride, the King is supposed to have remarked ‘I did not think that grafting my half-witted coxcomb upon a madwoman would improve the breed.’

  The distaste for Frederick was shared by Sir Robert Walpole, who described the Prince as being a ‘poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch that nobody loves, that nobody believes, that nobody will trust.’ Even the Queen (i.e. Frederick’s own mother) described him as ‘an avaricious, sordid monster.’ Stories abounded about Frederick’s love-life, giving rise to the opera Vanelia: or the Amours of the Great written by James Miller in 1732. It may not have been performed, but it contained over a score of songs similar to those in The Beggars Opera, all based upon an alleged affair between the young Prince and a lady named Vane.

  The public were fascinated by the royal spat, with Frederick, for his part, describing his father as ‘an obstinate, self-indulgent, miserly martinet with an insatiable sexual appetite.’ No love lost there then! Frederick died in March 1751, possibly as a result of a burst abscess on the lung. Another version of his death suggests he developed septicaemia after being hit on the head by a cricket ball (giving rise to the witticism that this was the first case of play stopped reign …). His demise resulted in this epigram which appeared in Horace Walpole’s Memoirs of the last ten years of the reign of George II, published in 1822:

  Here lies Fred,

  Who was alive and is dead:

  Had it been his father,

  I had much rather;

  Had it been his brother,

  Still better than another;

  Had it been his sister,

  No-one would have missed her;
r />   Had it been the whole generation,

  So much better for the nation.

  But since ‘tis only Fred,

  Who was alive, and is dead,

  There’s no more to be said.

  After the death of George II’s daughter Louisa at the end of 1756, the King made this rather poignant comment:

  This has been a fatal year for my family. I lost my eldest son – but I am glad of it … Now [Louisa] is gone. I know I did not love my children when they were young: I hated to have them running into my room; but now I love them as well as most fathers.

  It somehow epitomises the failings of the Hanoverians in terms of family values. Noone regarded the King as ‘father of the nation’ or expected him to be an inspirational role model. In October 1760, George II died of an aortic aneurism, while seated on the close stool (i.e. the toilet). At that point the throne passed to his grandson George William Frederick, eldest son of the late Frederick, Prince of Wales.

  GEORGE III – not a mistress in sight, but a prolific parent

  The grandson of George II was 22 years old when he came to the throne. It is ironic that his reign coincided with an explosion in the trade of satirical prints. They mocked his avarice, they mocked his miserliness, they mocked his simple tastes, and his interest in agriculture, but the one thing they could not do was mock his family values and constancy to the woman who became his queen.

  As a 23-year-old, he had met Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz for the very first time on the morning of his wedding in September 1761, but appears to have been completely smitten with her. They had fifteen children together, nine sons and six daughters, and as far as is known the King broke with family tradition and never once took a mistress. Not that this stopped a curious story emerging in 1770. This was to the effect that, as Prince of Wales, he had secretly married ‘a fair Quakeress’ by the name of Hannah Lightfoot on 17 April 1759, at Curzon Street Chapel, and that they had two children together. In 1788 Samuel William Fores published a caricature entitled The Fair Quaker of Cheltenham showing the young monarch addressing his ardour to a young lady under the shade of an overhanging tree. Not a shred of evidence supported this wild allegation, but ‘the story had legs’ to the extent that in the course of the next century various spurious claims were put forward. Futile applications were made through the courts, seeking to declare the children of Queen Charlotte illegitimate, on the basis that the King had married her bigamously. It shows the willingness of people to publish (and read) scandalous stories about the Royals. The idea that ‘truth should never get in the way of a good story’ is nothing new.