Flights of Georgian Fancy

Article reproduced from History Today, April 2010, Volume 60, Issue 4.

If you visit Kensington Palace, your ascent to the second-floor state apartments will be up the King’s Grand Staircase. You will find that the walls of this magnificent space are crowded with painted people: laughing, flirting, balancing dangerously on the balustrade, playing music, toying with their fans … and watching you as you climb. 

These paintings were completed in 1726 by the artist William Kent (c. 1685-1748) as part of George I’s grand and very necessary refurbishment of a palace built rather shoddily for William and Mary in the late 17th century. When I first became a curator at Historic Royal Palaces, my colleagues the room stewards used to tell me all sorts of stories about the identities of the sitters: that one lady was a mistress of George I; that another was a lover of George II. Intrigued but slightly sceptical, I decided one day to take a proper look at the evidence for who was who. 

I began with the 18th-century, Victorian and modern guide books to the palace. Confusion ensued. Each writer had different identifications of the portraits, some implausible, some contradicting each other. The task of unravelling the identities of the sitters began to captivate me. At that early stage I did not realise that it would take four years.

All the guide books agree on one fact: that the sitters include members of the royal household of George I (r. 1714-27). Kent’s masquerade-like wall painting shows real palace people looking to see who was coming up to visit the king. But I quickly came to realise that they were not noblemen and ladies-inwaiting entitled to attend social occasions in the state apartments. They were instead from the lower ranks of George I’s extensive household. Men and maids rather than masters and mistresses, they were people who lived at court all year round rather than serving in rotation as the senior courtiers did. 

Delving deeper

The opening stage of my first investigation concerned Ulrich Jorry, a dwarf comedian from Poland. A visitor to Kensington Palace writing in 1741 claimed that the staircase featured ‘Mr Ulrick, commonly called the Young Turk, in his Polonese dress, as he waited on the late King George’. 

Christian Ulrich Jorry was one of the long and proud parade of jesters and truthsayers close to England’s monarchs. His predecessors included Henry VIII’s Will Somers and Queen Henrietta Maria’s Jeffery Hudson. Like many a dwarf before him, Ulrich was presented to the king as a gift, by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha in this case, whose envoy was given a present of £330 in return. 

Despite his small stature, Ulrich had an immensely loud voice, almost deafening enough to ‘endanger the Royal Palace’ at full volume, as Jonathan Swift or possibly John Arbuthnot observed in the satirical poem It Cannot Rain but it Pours (1726). Sometimes he wore Turkish dress, at other times a fur-trimmed Polish cap. Ulrich received lessons in English and painting at the king’s expense. He was an obstreperous character who once spent a night locked up in the ‘hole’, or punishment room, at Kensington Palace for having made a sexual assault upon a maidservant. 

Notwithstanding the claims of the 1741 guide book, though, there is no figure present on the staircase with a close resemblance to Ulrich. His exact likeness is readily available from another picture of George I’s court. A panoramic view of a hunting expedition in 1725 hangs today over a photocopier in an office at Buckingham Palace. Ulrich, clearly labelled, is obviously a person of restricted growth and his likeness is not to be spotted in the staircase mural. 

Intimates of the king

However, two other exotic members of the king’s entourage, Mohammed and Mustapha, are included in both the hunting expedition painting and the wall painting at Kensington Palace. George I’s two Turkish servants endured a certain amount of envy and suspicion from the xenophobic English. Gossip reported that the king kept ‘two Turks for abominable uses’ and Londoners were full of ‘base reflections … that a TURK should be employed so near the Throne’. 

Mohammed and Mustapha were among the servants who had come over from Hanover with George I in 1714 when he inherited the British crown and he paid them out of his private purse. They did all the hands-on work of washing and dressing the king. Such menial tasks as warming his shirt by the fire, handing it to him, or – best of all – attending him in the ‘Secret or Privy Room’ containing his water closet, were highly prized. By custom, the Groom of the Stool had the honour of accompanying the king when ‘he goeth to make water’. An officer so intimate with the monarch was traditionally the most powerful in the court and until this point had always been a well-born and highly-placed courtier. 

When George I became king, however, he had made no appointment to the post of Groom of the Stool and broke with convention by continuing to dress in private as he had done in Hanover. Much to the annoyance of the senior British courtiers, they were kept out of the royal bedchamber. There the Turks ruled supreme. 

On the staircase Mohammed is boldly dressed in a blue cape, his eyebrow superciliously curved. His colleague Mustapha is older, white-bearded, turbaned. Mustapha presents a more exotic appearance and his waistcoat still bears a Turkish crescent moon over his heart. 

The pair guarded many royal secrets. In August 1717 George had the symptoms of haemorrhoids, or swellings in the anal arteries. The dangers of surgical removal (being ‘cut for the piles’) were well known. The whole matter was kept from the English courtiers and only the trusted Mohammed was able to persuade the king to undergo a rectal examination. All proved well, although George was advised to avoid sitting on a saddle. In gratitude the king nominated Mohammed for a title awarded by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles VI. His devoted servant chose the appropriate toponym ‘von Königstreu’, or ‘True to the King’. On other occasions Mustapha had the responsibility of administering the king’s laxatives. 

The two Turks had made a long journey to reach their privileged position. Mohammed was the son of a pasha (a high ranking Ottoman officer) sent to govern part of Peloponnesian Greece. The Muslim Ottoman and the Christian Habsburg empires clashed frequently in the 17th century and George I himself had campaigned in Hungary against the Turks, helping to lift the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. At some early but unknown point in his life, the young Mohammed was captured by a Hanoverian army officer and brought to Germany, where he converted to Christianity and married the daughter of a wealthy brewer: ‘I love her most heartily,’ he said of his wife, Maria Hedewig Mohammed. Perhaps she too is shown on the staircase, for Mohammed has his arm around a woman’s shoulders. They had three children – Sophia Caroline, Johann Ludewig and George Ludewig – named after various members of the electoral family of Hanover whom Mohammed would serve loyally for nearly 40 years. 

Entering George I’s service and following the king to England in 1714, Mohammed worked his way up from the rank of ‘bodyservant’ (Leibdiener) to the much grander ‘Keeper of the King’s Closet’. Mustapha, his older but junior colleague, made a similar journey. He arrived in Hanover after a period in the service of the Swedish army officer who had captured him.

Mohammed was such a favoured servant that he was painted several times during his lifetime. He was effectively (if not officially) Master of the Robes and Keeper of the Privy Purse to the king and government ministers often paid him court. He had his own servants who helped him wash the king’s clothes and he slept in a grand four-poster bed, probably at St James’s Palace, upholstered in scarlet and trimmed with lace. 

Access was the key to Mohammed’s power. The King’s Grand Staircase at Kensington Palace was the official way up to the king’s chambers, but there was also a small and secret service staircase elsewhere. This backstair was used by the servants and also by the king’s favoured friends. Anyone hoping to sneak up the backstair would find one of the king’s pages keeping guard. These gatekeepers wielded enormous influence, all the more so since Charles II (r. 1660-85) had delegated much control to one particular page, William Chiffinch (c. 1602-91). This favoured servant became ‘a man of so absolute authority’ that even government ministers obeyed his commands. Some, knowing his duties included letting in Charles II’s mistresses, called him the ‘Pimpmaster General’. 

Eventually Charles II acknowledged Chiffinch’s unofficial power with an official title: the first among the pages became known as the ‘Keeper of the King’s Closet, the same as that given to his successor Mohammed, George I’s chosen gatekeeper. That is why such a lubricious mythology grew up around the Turk. It was claimed that he too smuggled people in to fulfil the king’s bizarre and excessive sexual desires, or even that he fulfilled them himself. Yet no evidence exists for this. 

When choosing his sitters for the stairs, William Kent was attracted to pretty faces. One of these belonged to Mrs Elizabeth Tempest, milliner to George I’s daughter-in-law Caroline, Princess of Wales. According to an early 19th-century source, when Kent met Mrs Tempest he was ‘so struck with her appearance, as to beg her to sit for her picture’. To judge from her lovely visage and her fashionable black hood, Elizabeth Tempest may be the lady near the window. The Royal Archives record money paid to her for hat trimmings, especially the black French lace that Princess Caroline liked to drape round her head. 

Kent also included a number of scarlet-clad Yeomen of the Guard. The 100 Yeomen by now formed a great British institution, providing George I with a bodyguard whenever he left the palace. Created shortly after the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to protect Henry VII, this royal bodyguard has remained in existence ever since. Beginning in the reign of Henry VIII (r. 1509-47), Yeomen had worn ‘scarlet, with braidings and laces of gold’. Their right hands grasped a ceremonial partisan or bladed staff. An Italian visitor to London in 1669 provided the first mention of their alternative, informal name: ‘They are called “Beefeaters”, that is, eaters of beef, of which a considerable portion is allowed them daily by the Court.’ 

A plainly-dressed gentleman in the north-east corner of the staircase has long been known as ‘The Mysterious Quaker’. Ragnhild Hatton, George I’s biographer, suggested this because of his drab outfit and proposed that he represents the Quakers’ gratitude to George for his tolerance of their religious preferences. However, I have come to believe that ‘The Mysterious Quaker’ is someone completely different: Dr John Arbuthnot (1667-1735). 

Born in Scotland, Dr Arbuthnot had trained at the Marischal College in Aberdeen before heading south, studying mathematics and becoming Queen Anne’s physician in 1709. As well as an eminent scientist, he was also a member of the witty and iconoclastic society of writers called the Scriblerus Club, founded in 1712, of which his friends Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope were prominent members. 

In Dr Arbuthnot’s best-known satirical book, The History of John Bull (1712), the grumpy Everyman character of John Bull personifies the English people: red-faced, beer-drinking, Frenchman-hating. Yet Dr Arbuthnot’s jokes were gentle rather than savage, ‘like flaps of the face given in jest … no blackness will appear after the blows’. Arbuthnot was held ‘in great esteem with the whole court’, as a philosopher, a mathematician, and a ‘character of uncommon virtue and probity’. 

It is a relief to find that Dr Arbuthnot did have at least one imperfection: he was hopelessly addicted to cards. Despite his many hours of practice, he remained a dreadful player. On one renowned occasion, which gave much amusement to his friends, he played two games of quadrille against a dog and was still ‘most shamefully beaten’. 

The case for Arbuthnot

The reason for identifying ‘The Mysterious Quaker’ as Arbuthnot is threefold. First, the figure’s face is not inconsistent with the well-known portrait of Dr Arbuthnot by Godfrey Kneller painted in 1723 and now at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow. Secondly, Arbuthnot had some kind of physical problem with his legs. One friend joked that he was ‘a man that can do everything but walk’, which he did with ‘a sort of slouch’. In the staircase painting he leans upon his indispensable stout stick. Thirdly, Dr Arbuthnot played a significant part in the curious story of the figure standing right next to him: the curly-haired, green-clad Peter the Wild Boy. 

The Wild Boy, whose story is told by Roger Moorhouse on page 18, was a feral child kept at court as a kind of pet. He had been discovered in 1725 all alone in the woods near Hanover eating acorns and William Kent depicts him with a sprig of oak in his right hand. (His left hand is hidden behind the balustrade because a poorly-healed injury had left his fingers ‘web’d together like a duck’s foot’, as his condition is described in an anonymous pamphlet, possibly the work of Arbuthnot.) George I took Peter into his household and invited him to dinner, but the Wild Boy threw his food about and refused to touch meat. He would only eat ‘asparagus, or other garden-things’. Exasperated by the boy’s uncouth behaviour, the king arranged for Peter to undergo a course of ‘instruction as may best fit him for human society’. The Scottish doctor was chosen as Peter’s teacher and installed in an apartment joining the Wild Boy’s in the palace. Together they began daily lessons in language and manners. Dr Arbuthnot showed ‘care, skill and tenderness’ in trying to tame the Wild Boy. But progress was slow and painful as Peter had ‘a natural tendency to get away if not held by his coat’. 

Opinion was divided about whether Dr Arbuthnot was successful or not. Peter did indeed learn how to ‘pronounce and utter after his tutor words of one syllable’. He also acquired a few social graces: he could kiss his fingers and make a bow. 

Yet many people thought that Peter still retained his ‘natural wildness in all his actions and behaviour’. Peter would never really engage with other people through language. It is not clear what his condition was. It is likely that he was autistic, but medical opinion cannot agree upon whether he was born with his condition and abandoned in the woods by a mother who thought him defective, or whether his behaviour resulted from an early family tragedy that left him completely alone and without social stimulus. 

Many people, wrapped up in one of the central debates of the Enlightenment, questioned whether Peter could be truly human if he lacked language. But the kindly Dr Arbuthnot remained absolutely convinced that Peter the Wild Boy was human and did have a soul. He arranged for Peter to be baptised at his own home in Cork Street on July 5th, 1726. 

Finally, on the ceiling above the staircase, William Kent added four more personal portraits. The ebullient painter had many friends at court. Indeed he had won this very commission, although young and untested, through the influence of supporters such as the Earl of Burlington. An excellent networker and bon viveur, Kent was described by Alexander Pope as ‘very hot, & very fat’ and would eventually die of ‘high feeding and much inaction’. He included a portrait of himself that expresses his extrovert character: plump, jolly and smiling. 

Marriage debate

Whispering into Kent’s left ear is the lady presumed to be his lover, the formidable Elizabeth Butler. She was an actress and would become renowned for playing a fierce Lady Macbeth and a brutal Gertrude. With perhaps more romance than truth, it was claimed that she was ‘an illegitimate daughter of a noble duke’. Kent lived ‘in particular friendship’ with her and had begun to spend his free time – when he was not required by Lord Burlington – at her home. He may have been too indolent, or perhaps he valued his independence too much, for Kent never actually moved in with his lover. Whether Kent was married or not is a big debate. There’s no record that he ever was, but he might have been because Elizabeth’s will describes her as a ‘widow’ and Kent left money in his will to Elizabeth and her children. If he wasn’t their father and her husband, who was? 

Kent is shown here at the glorious moment of successfully completing his first royal commission. He is the focus of admiring attention from his lover and the two assistants who helped him paint the staircase, Robert and Franciscus. Lit from below, the group’s cheeks glow and their eyes sparkle as if they are actors upon a stage receiving applause. This is a self-portrait of a self-confident artist on his way to creating the definitive look of the Georgian age. 

William Kent’s painted staircase still holds many secrets, but at least the identity of some of its more colourful characters can now be more or less securely pinned to the page.

Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, whose properties include Kensington Palace.

Further reading:

• Edward Impey, Kensington Palace: The Official Illustrated History (Merrell, 2003);
• Michael I. Wilson, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Painter, Gardener (Routledge, 1984)
• Timothy Mowl, William Kent: Architect, Designer, Opportunist (Jonathan Cape, 2006)
• Hannah Smith, Georgian Monarchy, Politics and Culture 1714-60 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
• For further articles on this subject, visit: www.historytoday.com/georgians

Reader offer:

Lucy Worsley’s new book Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace is published by Faber & Faber on May 6th, priced £20. To order your copy at 20% discount plus free P&P go to www.faber.co.uk using promotional code historytoday1 at the checkout. Offer applies to orders to UK mainland addresses only and closes on June 30th, 2010.