Read Online The King's Mistress: The True & Scandalous Story of the Woman Who Stole the Heart of George I by Claudia Gold - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Claudia Gold
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state . . . The King then appeared, followed by the three young Princesses who reside with him in the Palace; they are the Prince of Wales’s three eldest daughters . . . I was surprised at seeing everyone making a profound reverence or bow as the King went by, which he in his turn acknowledged by a slight inclination of the head. The English do not consider their King to be so very much above them that they dare not salute him, as in France; they respect him and are faithful to him, and often sincerely attached to him. I speak, of course, of those who favour the reigning family . . .
From this room you go into that of the Gentlemen Pensioners, called the Presence Chamber, which is furnished with antique hangings, and from thence into another room, where the gentlemen of the Court await the opening of the King’s apartments. The King’s chambers consist firstly of a big room which leads into the bedchamber, the bed being covered with crimson velvet, braided and embroidered in gold. The bed stands in a sort of alcove, shut off from the rest of the room by a balustrade of gilded wood. To the right of the grand ante-chamber is the drawing-room, where the King gives audiences and receives ambassadors. In these two chambers there are canopies of purple velvet. All these rooms look on to the park gardens, and are hung with beautiful old tapestries . . .
. . . Three Drawing-rooms are held every week, one on Sundays from two till three, and the other two on Mondays and Fridays from eight till ten or eleven in the evening. These evening circles are much pleasanter than those held on Sundays, for the apartments are magnificently lighted, and more ladies attend them, and the latter are always an ornament to society . . .
But the court was not all pomp and glitter. Many needed the financial security that a place offered. John Gay wrote of the demoralizing necessity of attending evening after evening in the hope of finding courtly work:
Pensive each night, from room to room I walk’d,
To one I bow’d, and with another talk’d;
Enquir’d what news, or such a lady’s name,
And did the next day, and the next, the same.
Places, I found, were daily given away,
And yet no friendly Gazette mention’d Gay.
I ask’d a friend what method to pursue;
He cry’d, I want a place, as well as you.
9.
A City out of Rubble
‘The Contagion of the building influenza . . . has extended its virulence to the country where it rages with unabating violence . . . The metropolis is manifestly the centre of the disease . . . Mansions arise daily upon the marshes of Lambeth, the roads of Kensington, and the hills of Hampstead . . . The chain of buildings so closely unites the country with the town that the distinction is lost between Cheapside and St George’s fields . . .’
Henry Kett 1
London, Melusine’s new home, was the most exciting city in the world, the capital of a burgeoning empire. Eighteenth-century Britain has been called ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, and it was trade and the strength of the rich mercantile classes that led London to develop independently of the whims of the monarch or according to any grand design. Successful wars, colonial possessions, and trade – particularly the slave trade – had made her rich. The boom towns of Manchester and Birmingham had grown fat on producing materials for the wars with France. And when Britain acquired the lucrative slave contract – the exclusive right to export Africans to the Americas as slaves – from Spain in 1713, growth in the ports on the western seaboard surged.
London was an incredibly noisy, crowded city. In 1791 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob,’ but, he continued, it was just Londoners ‘sauntering or trudging’ along. 2 It was a common enough sight. During the first half of the century ten thousand new people arrived every year, and by 1750 London was home to 10 per cent of the country’s
From this room you go into that of the Gentlemen Pensioners, called the Presence Chamber, which is furnished with antique hangings, and from thence into another room, where the gentlemen of the Court await the opening of the King’s apartments. The King’s chambers consist firstly of a big room which leads into the bedchamber, the bed being covered with crimson velvet, braided and embroidered in gold. The bed stands in a sort of alcove, shut off from the rest of the room by a balustrade of gilded wood. To the right of the grand ante-chamber is the drawing-room, where the King gives audiences and receives ambassadors. In these two chambers there are canopies of purple velvet. All these rooms look on to the park gardens, and are hung with beautiful old tapestries . . .
. . . Three Drawing-rooms are held every week, one on Sundays from two till three, and the other two on Mondays and Fridays from eight till ten or eleven in the evening. These evening circles are much pleasanter than those held on Sundays, for the apartments are magnificently lighted, and more ladies attend them, and the latter are always an ornament to society . . .
But the court was not all pomp and glitter. Many needed the financial security that a place offered. John Gay wrote of the demoralizing necessity of attending evening after evening in the hope of finding courtly work:
Pensive each night, from room to room I walk’d,
To one I bow’d, and with another talk’d;
Enquir’d what news, or such a lady’s name,
And did the next day, and the next, the same.
Places, I found, were daily given away,
And yet no friendly Gazette mention’d Gay.
I ask’d a friend what method to pursue;
He cry’d, I want a place, as well as you.
9.
A City out of Rubble
‘The Contagion of the building influenza . . . has extended its virulence to the country where it rages with unabating violence . . . The metropolis is manifestly the centre of the disease . . . Mansions arise daily upon the marshes of Lambeth, the roads of Kensington, and the hills of Hampstead . . . The chain of buildings so closely unites the country with the town that the distinction is lost between Cheapside and St George’s fields . . .’
Henry Kett 1
London, Melusine’s new home, was the most exciting city in the world, the capital of a burgeoning empire. Eighteenth-century Britain has been called ‘a nation of shopkeepers’, and it was trade and the strength of the rich mercantile classes that led London to develop independently of the whims of the monarch or according to any grand design. Successful wars, colonial possessions, and trade – particularly the slave trade – had made her rich. The boom towns of Manchester and Birmingham had grown fat on producing materials for the wars with France. And when Britain acquired the lucrative slave contract – the exclusive right to export Africans to the Americas as slaves – from Spain in 1713, growth in the ports on the western seaboard surged.
London was an incredibly noisy, crowded city. In 1791 Horace Walpole wrote: ‘I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob,’ but, he continued, it was just Londoners ‘sauntering or trudging’ along. 2 It was a common enough sight. During the first half of the century ten thousand new people arrived every year, and by 1750 London was home to 10 per cent of the country’s
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