Lucy Worsley: Courtiers. (Book Review)
This is a delightful book given to me as a Christmas present by kathyh. Subtitle: "The Secret History of the Georgian Court", it covers the era between the time of Georg Ludiwig, Prince Elector of Han(n)over, becoming King George I. of England, and the death of George II, with a brief "Where are they now?" overview about the last of the protagonists spending their final years during George III's reign. The "Georgian" designation not withstanding, I can understand why Lucy Worsley makes a break after G2's death, since the court culture changes with the new incoming young King, the third George and the first one to be born and raised in Britain (and will of course change again once he has his final nervous breakdown and we get into the Regency era).
While the lives of the first two Hannover Kings, their wife (in the case of the second George), children and mistresses form the red thread through the narrative, the central focus is more often than not on the courtiers of the title, with the main protagonists other than the Royals being Lord and Lady Hervey (nee Molly Lepell), Henrietta Howard, Peter Wentworth, "Wild Peter", G1's Turkish bodyservants Muhammad and Mustafa, and in the last fourth or so Horace Walpole the younger. Now, I've read and reviewed several of the memoirs and biographies quoted in this book (which allowed me to nitpick a little, more about this later because I'm a show-off this way), but there still was enough new to me to make me treasure the book for the additional information alone. Luckily for me, it's also very entertainingly written. Mind you, while Lucy Worsley accurately points out source bias in, say, Lord Hervey, she then does thinkgs like ten pages later reproducing only slightly paraphrased Hervey's account without saying a) the story is from him and b) he's the only source.
It's also a very British book in that while Worsley laudably refutes several of the older clichés about the Georges (such as G1 being undereducated when in fact he spoke more languages than most of his usually monolingual English courtiers - English unfortunately was the one he learned last and spoke worst), you can tell her impressive bibliography is 99% British in origin, and the rest is translated. This sometimes means the reproduction of older errors - more about this in a moment - and sometimes it means repetitive descriptions - so every time a German principality is mentioned, be it Hannover itself or Queen Caroline's native Ansbach or Princess Augusta's state of origin, it is "sleepy". Sidenote re: Hannover, compared to London, sure. Compared to just about every other British city? Not so much. Thanks largely to the only recently dead Sophie (granddaughter of James I and VI and reason why her son Georg Ludwing became George I), it had a thriving cultural life, with Leibniz as one of the top stars, politically, it had accumulated enough power to become an Electorate in the first place before getting the British crown and was one of the prime movers and shakers in the HRE. And of course bloodlines are ridiculous, but given all the fuss the British nobliity made about their new German sovereigns as recent upstars, it's worth pointing out that the Hannover clan were Welfs, i.e. they were members of one of the oldest noble families of Europe, who could trace their ancestors back to to the time of Charlemagne, which is more than any of the snobby English aristocrats would have been able to do, who were usually lucky of they had ancestors going back furrther than the Tudors. Lastly, that enterprising and witty travelling English writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, did visit Hannover as most British visitors did at the time and had a great deal of sarcastic observations to make, but something that really impressed her were the (then) modern housing facilities, especially the tiled stoves, which she would have much liked to have in often damp London.
(Speaking of Lady Mary, she is alas quoted and referenced re: tie innocculation against smallpox innovation - but not one of the courtiers focused upon in this book, which I can understand because Lucy Worsley went for people who really lived at court nearly all the time, and this was only briefly true of Lady Mary.)
Within that selection of characters, I appreciated we got as much about the Turkish attendants of G1 as we did; they're written as characters, not set decorations, and they're other than "Wild Peter" and late in the day G2's mistress Amalie von Waldenburg (later Lady Yarmouth) the only non-English courtiers. (Which is unsurprising due to the lack of German sources used.) They're also a counterpoint to otherwise near exclusively aristocratic cast, though with the focus on court life, the booik neither intends to nor does provide a cultural history of Engliand in the era per se. The character who surprised me most, due to the difference of what I had read before and how Lucy Worsley described her, was Molly Lepell, later Lady Hervey. How she shows up in, say, her husband's biography or Leonhard Horowski's immensely entertaining "Das Jahrhundert der Könige": one of Caroline's maids of honor, marries for love future biting memoirist and bisexual icon Lord Hervey, who proceeds to fall out of love and neglects or ignores her for most of the remaining marriage while persuing his affairs, and then treats her meanly in his last will as a final insult, for not only does he explicitly not give her more than he absolutely has to, legal-wise, but he wants their children raised by someone else (this clause was subsequently ignored). The words "long-suffering" are used more than once by both Hervey's biographer and Horowski.Just about the only explanation I had found in Hervey's memoirs for why he didn't just grow indifferent to his wife but came to dislike her when she seems to have been liked by most other people was that she favoured the guy politically he later dueled with (not about her! the guy basically described him as gay as openly as you could as a bitchy Georgian courtier, in an age where sodomy was still a capital offense).
Meanwhille, Worsley: attributes the fallout between the Herveys in addition to these factors to a brief but intense flirtation Molly had with G2, quotes her as saying children bore her and she can't stand being with them (this makes the clause in the last will look different) and describes Molly then beccoming an open Jacobite, which for a Georgian career courtier certainly is...original. (Sadly, Worsley does not include what used to be my favourite story involving Molly, the fact that when Hervey's passion du jour, 18th century sex pot Francesco Algarotti, got a call from Prussia from newly ascended to the throne Frederick the Great, he departed so quickly from Hervey's lodgings that almost his entire luggage remained behind, and Molly was the one to pack it and mail it to Algarotti in Berlin.) Anyway, Molly is still a cheated on wife in Worsley's book, but anything but long suffering and with a spiky personality of her own.
The potentially saddest story which I was afraid would go horribly but which then turned out to go far better than most other similar cases was that of "Wild Peter", a feral boy found in the woods in the Hannover principality who didn't wear any clothing and could not speak. Bearing in mind the most famous case of similar "wild children" , Kaspar Hauser, I braced myself for impending tragedy as the kid was treated as a mascot/pet which G1 and his daughter-in-law Caroline competed for for a time and who attracted a lot of curiosity as well as scientific attention. But as opposed to other cases, Peter fared relatively well. He never did learn to speak, and after Caroline's death, the crown paid a succession of farmers to take care of him in the countryside, but he wasn't abused, or forced to work, and he became very attached to his caretakers. While no one was ever sure how old exactly he was, he seems to have died of natural causes as an older man". The fascination "Wild Peter" caused for a while was a very 18th century thing with all the musings about the "natural state of men" and the debate on how language was formed, and again, I can understand why Worsley picked him and not, say, Händel.
The constant family soap opera with fierce intergenerational fights that marked the Hannover royal family and accordingly split the courtiers who always had to decide whether to go with the royals in power or bet on the Prince of Wales and future preferement is reported with relish but also more sympathy than their contemporaries had, with Worsley good at reminding her readers of long term causes in this series of family dysfunctionalities. Where we miss out, and that's not a big complaint because you can only include so much before readers get hopelessly confused, are all the continental cross connections. I mean, I can understand Lord Hervey getting bored by G2 treating genealogy as one of his two favourite subjects and regularly tuning out - I'd have, too -, but who was related to whom actually was politically relevant in that century, sometimes caused wars, and on a less bloody but still important scale, completely alters the perception of relationships in question. Thus Worsley, following Hervey, repeats his quip that a certain "Countess d' Elitz" slept with G1, G2 and Frederick, Prince of Wales. Except that the lady in question was Anna Luise von der Schulenburg, Countess of Dölitz, illegitimate daughter of G1 and his mistress Melusine von der Schulenburg. (One of three daughters; Worsley is only ware of the younger two.) Now keep in mind Hervey doesn't claim three generations incest has been going on (and he so would have). Bored-by-German genealogy Hervey simply wasn't aware of the actual relationship but did notice the woman was hanging out and treated with intimacy by three generations of Hannovers. (More about this here.) This is similar mistake to the one most Georgian courtiers and following them lots of British historians made about the Countess von Platen, G1's half sister, the illegitimate daughter of his father Ernst August, whom they thought was his alternate mistress to Melusine von Schulenburg until someone finally bothered to check out the German sources, only Worsley is aware of that one, while missing out on the "D'Elitz/Dölitz" case.
(Sidenote: in case you're wondering, this being the gossipy 18th century, the German courtiers and memoirists so would have reported incest gossip - they sure did in the cause of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and his favourite daughter - but in this case, there is zilch. It simply was customary to treat your (noble) iillegitimate children as part of your family for the Hannover clan. Noting the familiarity, speaking little French and no German, the English aristocrats promptly went for the wrong conclusion.)
And speaking of German relations, when I read that G2 and Caroline's daughter Amalie/Emily - who remained unmarried - never had a prince interested who could have been a serious match, I imagined generations of Prussian historians having coughing attacks. In the interminable saga dubbed "The English marriage project" that provided the fodder of the fierce marital warfare between Frederick the Great's parents, with his mother, G2's sister Sophia Dorothea, wishing for nothing more than to marry her oldest son and daughter to their Hannover cousins and his father Frederick William going from luke warm to actively against it, future Frederick the Great was not just the intended groom for Amalie/Emily but actually pledgled himself in writing to marry only her in a letter to Queen Caroline which when found out resulted in his abusive fataher's most famous explosions and beat downs. I mean, it's not that I'm unaware G2 wasn't any more keen on those marriages than Frederick William, and so they never had much of a chance to happen, but the fact of the matter is, young Friedrich did propose, and certainly he was an interested prince who could have been a serious match. (Two more Frederick the Great trivia not appearing in this volume, his tragically to be executed boyfriend Hans Herrmann von Katte was losely related to Melusine von Schulenburg, visited Britain in the late 1920s and had a brief flirtation with one of her daughters, the later Lady Chesterfield. Oh, and Molly Lepell/Lady Hervey was directly related to the guy in charge of Küstrin who had to oversee Katte's execution and Frederick's imprisonment.)
Anyway, these are just minor nitpicks, and since they concern matters not really the focus of the book, they did not take away from my enjoyment of it at all. It really does paint a vivid picture of 18th century court life and of all the invidiuals Worsley chose to highlight, and has not one boring page in it.
While the lives of the first two Hannover Kings, their wife (in the case of the second George), children and mistresses form the red thread through the narrative, the central focus is more often than not on the courtiers of the title, with the main protagonists other than the Royals being Lord and Lady Hervey (nee Molly Lepell), Henrietta Howard, Peter Wentworth, "Wild Peter", G1's Turkish bodyservants Muhammad and Mustafa, and in the last fourth or so Horace Walpole the younger. Now, I've read and reviewed several of the memoirs and biographies quoted in this book (which allowed me to nitpick a little, more about this later because I'm a show-off this way), but there still was enough new to me to make me treasure the book for the additional information alone. Luckily for me, it's also very entertainingly written. Mind you, while Lucy Worsley accurately points out source bias in, say, Lord Hervey, she then does thinkgs like ten pages later reproducing only slightly paraphrased Hervey's account without saying a) the story is from him and b) he's the only source.
It's also a very British book in that while Worsley laudably refutes several of the older clichés about the Georges (such as G1 being undereducated when in fact he spoke more languages than most of his usually monolingual English courtiers - English unfortunately was the one he learned last and spoke worst), you can tell her impressive bibliography is 99% British in origin, and the rest is translated. This sometimes means the reproduction of older errors - more about this in a moment - and sometimes it means repetitive descriptions - so every time a German principality is mentioned, be it Hannover itself or Queen Caroline's native Ansbach or Princess Augusta's state of origin, it is "sleepy". Sidenote re: Hannover, compared to London, sure. Compared to just about every other British city? Not so much. Thanks largely to the only recently dead Sophie (granddaughter of James I and VI and reason why her son Georg Ludwing became George I), it had a thriving cultural life, with Leibniz as one of the top stars, politically, it had accumulated enough power to become an Electorate in the first place before getting the British crown and was one of the prime movers and shakers in the HRE. And of course bloodlines are ridiculous, but given all the fuss the British nobliity made about their new German sovereigns as recent upstars, it's worth pointing out that the Hannover clan were Welfs, i.e. they were members of one of the oldest noble families of Europe, who could trace their ancestors back to to the time of Charlemagne, which is more than any of the snobby English aristocrats would have been able to do, who were usually lucky of they had ancestors going back furrther than the Tudors. Lastly, that enterprising and witty travelling English writer, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, did visit Hannover as most British visitors did at the time and had a great deal of sarcastic observations to make, but something that really impressed her were the (then) modern housing facilities, especially the tiled stoves, which she would have much liked to have in often damp London.
(Speaking of Lady Mary, she is alas quoted and referenced re: tie innocculation against smallpox innovation - but not one of the courtiers focused upon in this book, which I can understand because Lucy Worsley went for people who really lived at court nearly all the time, and this was only briefly true of Lady Mary.)
Within that selection of characters, I appreciated we got as much about the Turkish attendants of G1 as we did; they're written as characters, not set decorations, and they're other than "Wild Peter" and late in the day G2's mistress Amalie von Waldenburg (later Lady Yarmouth) the only non-English courtiers. (Which is unsurprising due to the lack of German sources used.) They're also a counterpoint to otherwise near exclusively aristocratic cast, though with the focus on court life, the booik neither intends to nor does provide a cultural history of Engliand in the era per se. The character who surprised me most, due to the difference of what I had read before and how Lucy Worsley described her, was Molly Lepell, later Lady Hervey. How she shows up in, say, her husband's biography or Leonhard Horowski's immensely entertaining "Das Jahrhundert der Könige": one of Caroline's maids of honor, marries for love future biting memoirist and bisexual icon Lord Hervey, who proceeds to fall out of love and neglects or ignores her for most of the remaining marriage while persuing his affairs, and then treats her meanly in his last will as a final insult, for not only does he explicitly not give her more than he absolutely has to, legal-wise, but he wants their children raised by someone else (this clause was subsequently ignored). The words "long-suffering" are used more than once by both Hervey's biographer and Horowski.Just about the only explanation I had found in Hervey's memoirs for why he didn't just grow indifferent to his wife but came to dislike her when she seems to have been liked by most other people was that she favoured the guy politically he later dueled with (not about her! the guy basically described him as gay as openly as you could as a bitchy Georgian courtier, in an age where sodomy was still a capital offense).
Meanwhille, Worsley: attributes the fallout between the Herveys in addition to these factors to a brief but intense flirtation Molly had with G2, quotes her as saying children bore her and she can't stand being with them (this makes the clause in the last will look different) and describes Molly then beccoming an open Jacobite, which for a Georgian career courtier certainly is...original. (Sadly, Worsley does not include what used to be my favourite story involving Molly, the fact that when Hervey's passion du jour, 18th century sex pot Francesco Algarotti, got a call from Prussia from newly ascended to the throne Frederick the Great, he departed so quickly from Hervey's lodgings that almost his entire luggage remained behind, and Molly was the one to pack it and mail it to Algarotti in Berlin.) Anyway, Molly is still a cheated on wife in Worsley's book, but anything but long suffering and with a spiky personality of her own.
The potentially saddest story which I was afraid would go horribly but which then turned out to go far better than most other similar cases was that of "Wild Peter", a feral boy found in the woods in the Hannover principality who didn't wear any clothing and could not speak. Bearing in mind the most famous case of similar "wild children" , Kaspar Hauser, I braced myself for impending tragedy as the kid was treated as a mascot/pet which G1 and his daughter-in-law Caroline competed for for a time and who attracted a lot of curiosity as well as scientific attention. But as opposed to other cases, Peter fared relatively well. He never did learn to speak, and after Caroline's death, the crown paid a succession of farmers to take care of him in the countryside, but he wasn't abused, or forced to work, and he became very attached to his caretakers. While no one was ever sure how old exactly he was, he seems to have died of natural causes as an older man". The fascination "Wild Peter" caused for a while was a very 18th century thing with all the musings about the "natural state of men" and the debate on how language was formed, and again, I can understand why Worsley picked him and not, say, Händel.
The constant family soap opera with fierce intergenerational fights that marked the Hannover royal family and accordingly split the courtiers who always had to decide whether to go with the royals in power or bet on the Prince of Wales and future preferement is reported with relish but also more sympathy than their contemporaries had, with Worsley good at reminding her readers of long term causes in this series of family dysfunctionalities. Where we miss out, and that's not a big complaint because you can only include so much before readers get hopelessly confused, are all the continental cross connections. I mean, I can understand Lord Hervey getting bored by G2 treating genealogy as one of his two favourite subjects and regularly tuning out - I'd have, too -, but who was related to whom actually was politically relevant in that century, sometimes caused wars, and on a less bloody but still important scale, completely alters the perception of relationships in question. Thus Worsley, following Hervey, repeats his quip that a certain "Countess d' Elitz" slept with G1, G2 and Frederick, Prince of Wales. Except that the lady in question was Anna Luise von der Schulenburg, Countess of Dölitz, illegitimate daughter of G1 and his mistress Melusine von der Schulenburg. (One of three daughters; Worsley is only ware of the younger two.) Now keep in mind Hervey doesn't claim three generations incest has been going on (and he so would have). Bored-by-German genealogy Hervey simply wasn't aware of the actual relationship but did notice the woman was hanging out and treated with intimacy by three generations of Hannovers. (More about this here.) This is similar mistake to the one most Georgian courtiers and following them lots of British historians made about the Countess von Platen, G1's half sister, the illegitimate daughter of his father Ernst August, whom they thought was his alternate mistress to Melusine von Schulenburg until someone finally bothered to check out the German sources, only Worsley is aware of that one, while missing out on the "D'Elitz/Dölitz" case.
(Sidenote: in case you're wondering, this being the gossipy 18th century, the German courtiers and memoirists so would have reported incest gossip - they sure did in the cause of Augustus the Strong of Saxony and his favourite daughter - but in this case, there is zilch. It simply was customary to treat your (noble) iillegitimate children as part of your family for the Hannover clan. Noting the familiarity, speaking little French and no German, the English aristocrats promptly went for the wrong conclusion.)
And speaking of German relations, when I read that G2 and Caroline's daughter Amalie/Emily - who remained unmarried - never had a prince interested who could have been a serious match, I imagined generations of Prussian historians having coughing attacks. In the interminable saga dubbed "The English marriage project" that provided the fodder of the fierce marital warfare between Frederick the Great's parents, with his mother, G2's sister Sophia Dorothea, wishing for nothing more than to marry her oldest son and daughter to their Hannover cousins and his father Frederick William going from luke warm to actively against it, future Frederick the Great was not just the intended groom for Amalie/Emily but actually pledgled himself in writing to marry only her in a letter to Queen Caroline which when found out resulted in his abusive fataher's most famous explosions and beat downs. I mean, it's not that I'm unaware G2 wasn't any more keen on those marriages than Frederick William, and so they never had much of a chance to happen, but the fact of the matter is, young Friedrich did propose, and certainly he was an interested prince who could have been a serious match. (Two more Frederick the Great trivia not appearing in this volume, his tragically to be executed boyfriend Hans Herrmann von Katte was losely related to Melusine von Schulenburg, visited Britain in the late 1920s and had a brief flirtation with one of her daughters, the later Lady Chesterfield. Oh, and Molly Lepell/Lady Hervey was directly related to the guy in charge of Küstrin who had to oversee Katte's execution and Frederick's imprisonment.)
Anyway, these are just minor nitpicks, and since they concern matters not really the focus of the book, they did not take away from my enjoyment of it at all. It really does paint a vivid picture of 18th century court life and of all the invidiuals Worsley chose to highlight, and has not one boring page in it.