Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace

Lucy Worsley

Nearly all horrible people as she describes them; it is impossible not to want to know how they all end up. As Chief Curator at the Royal Palaces, Worsley has worked with and among these characters for years. She takes as her starting point – and it’s a good one – the decorations on the King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace where in the 1720s William Kent embellished the walls and ceilings with portraits of palace inmates. These portraits remain and as Worsley decodes them their characters as well as their roles serve as guides to the court’s elite, from King George I down to George III, with their wives, mistresses, children, assorted lords and ladies and a few more important if distant connections. Connection, in that place and in those days, was everything.

This is a colourful and extensive cast of characters although, despite Worsley’s efforts to humanise her favourites, none is particularly appealing. Some who have competence as well as charm, intelligence as well as integrity, seem to have been emotionally or intellectually throttled by etiquette, especially stringent in a dynasty attempting to establish itself as the rightful as much as the inevitable succession to the throne. The monarchy had gone through a long period of lateral descent; when Queen Anne’s 18 pregnancies left no surviving child, George Augustus, Elector of Hanover and through his mother a great-grandson of James I, was invited to accept the British throne. This reluctant elevation, which introduced the Georgian era, brought him little, if any, happiness; his solace lay in constant visits to Hanover.

Worsley gives a lot of early attention to the work which made Kensingon Palace the building the public sees today and to the rival merits and careers of painters Sir James Thornhill and William Kent. Of course the ambitious had to adapt to the sometimes ludicrous conditions of court life, but Worsley makes it plain that a court stultified by regal insecurity was almost as personally, if no longer physically, dangerous as those of, for example, the Tudors. Banishment, exile and penury were the dreaded punishments inflicted by the Hanoverians, but it seems clear that the inflexible family resentments of the first two Georges infiltrated everything and everyone around them and poisoned life at court to a degree found insufferable by those few people – men and women – who were brave enough, and had resources enough, to escape.

At the same time these dramas were almost domestic in character, a welcome alternative to the civil wars, foreign wars, revolts and instability of the previous century. The Georges were more likely to tolerate the new limitations on royal power in favour of a stronger parliament. Although Worsley can only skim over the immense political changes taking place in England in these decades this is probably fair enough given that her theme is the courtiers who wasted many long years in attendance on a series of reclusive (until George IV) monarchs. But the result is a little unbalanced: Queen Caroline is given her due as a well-educated and discerning woman, and there is great reliance on the memoirs of Lord Hervey, but the dynasty’s lasting achievements through patronage of music, painting, architecture and through the great collections which formed the nucleus of the British Library are missing from an entertaining study.