Caroline the Illustrious, vol. 2 (of 2) : $b Queen-Consort of George II. and sometime Queen-Regent; a study of her life and timeWilkins, W. H. (William Henry)
History
Caroline the Illustrious, vol. 2 (of 2) : $b Queen-Consort of George II. and sometime Queen-Regent; a study of her life and time
Wilkins, W. H. (William Henry)
Caroline, Queen, consort of George II, King of Great Britain, 1683-1737
Among minor figures about the court two of the most familiar were
Lord Lifford and his sister, Lady Charlotte de Roussie. They were the
children of a Count de Roussie, a French Protestant who came over to
England with William of Orange in 1688, and was created by him Earl
of Lifford in the peerage of Ireland. They were typical courtiers of
the baser sort, and would perform the meanest offices and indulge in
the grossest flattery in order to win some rays of the royal favour.
They were not popular with any of the English people about the court.
Hervey tells us: “They had during four reigns subsisted upon the scanty
charity of the English Court. They were constantly, every night in the
country and three nights in the town, alone with the King or Queen for
an hour or two before they went to bed, during which time the King
walked about and talked to the brother of arms, or to the sister of
genealogies, whilst the Queen nodded and yawned, till from yawning she
came to nodding, and nodding to snoring. These two miserable Court
drudges, who were in a more constant waiting than any of the pages
of the backstairs, were very simple and very quiet, did nobody any
hurt, nor anybody but His Majesty any pleasure, who paid them so ill
for all their assiduity and slavery that they were not only not in
affluence, but laboured under the disagreeable burdens of small debts,
which £1,000 would have paid, and had not an allowance from the Court,
that enabled them to appear there even in the common decency of clean
clothes. The King nevertheless was always saying how well he loved
them, and calling them the best people in the world, but though he
never forgot their goodness he never remembered their poverty.”
Another foreign dependent was Schütz, a Hanoverian. Pope, who had lost
the favour of the Court, was very bitter upon those who retained it; in
one of his ballads he sings:--
Alas! like Schütz I cannot pun,
Like Grafton court the Germans,
Tell Pickenbourg how slim she’s grown,
Like Meadows run to sermons.
Hervey satirises Schütz’s dulness as follows:--
And sure in sleep no dulness you need fear
Who, ev’n awake, can Schütz and Lifford bear.
And again--
Charlotte and Schütz like angry monkeys chatter,
None guessing what’s the language or the matter.
While in another of his satires occur these lines:--
There is another Court booby, at once hot and dull,
Your pious pimp Schütz, a mean Hanover tool.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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