St. James's was given to Anne and her husband by the new sovereign William the Third. She made it her chief palace when she came to the throne, and such it continued to be with the sovereigns of England till the reign of George the Third, with whom its occupation was divided with Buckingham house. Lady Strafford, the wild daughter of Rochester, who lived in France because England, she said, was "too dull" for her, used to relate stories of the "orgies" in Anne's palace. Palaces for the most part have been places of greater license than the world supposes, owing to the natural results of luxury, privilege, and the bringing of idle and agreeable people together; but the orgies which the rattle-headed Lady Strafford talked of, were probably never anything much greater than a drinking-bout of her husband, who unluckily taught his wife to drink too. Anne, between her Protestant accession and her exiled Popish kindred, her imperious favourite the Duchess of Marlborough, and her quarrelling and fluctuating Administrations, had an anxious time of it. There is an old French story of a sage but ugly cavalier, who married a handsome fool, in the persuasion that his children would inherit their mother's beauty and his own wisdom. Unfortunately, they turned out to be specimens of his own ugliness, combined with the mother's folly. We do not say that Queen Anne was a fool, though she was not very wise; but when her grandfather, Lord Clarendon, saw the match between his clever daughter and the future James the Second, he probably hoped that their offspring would possess the father's figure combined with the mother's wit; whereas neither Mary nor Anne possessed the latter, and Anne inherited the mother's fat with the father's dulness. She was a well-meaning and fond, but sluggish-minded woman, with no force of character; her temperament was heavy and lax; she did not know what to do with her political perplexities; and the screw-up of her nerves with strong waters appears to have become irresistible. Swift gives a curious account of her levees, in which she would sit with a parcel of courtiers about her, silently giving glances at them, and putting the end of her fan in her mouth for want of address. She was glad to get the whole set away, that she might sink into her easy chair, and complain of the troubles of human life.
St. James's thus began with being a dull court, and dull for the most part it remained to the last—quite worthy of its external appearance. George the First and Second were both dull gentlemen, with a difference; the former a pale round-featured man, content to appear the insipid personage he was; the latter, aquiline-nosed, affecting spirit and gallantry, and attaining only to rudeness. They were people of the then German schools of breeding, very different from the present; and St. James's at that time combined a tasteless air of decorum with gallantries equally unengaging. George the First had two German mistresses, one as lean as the other was fat; and George the Second another, remarkable for nothing but making money. Lady Wortley Montagu and Horace Walpole have given some amusing notices of the palace in connection with their Majesties and the court.
"This is a strange country," said George the First on his coming to England. "The first morning after my arrival at St. James's, I looked out of the window and saw a park with walks, a canal, &c., which they told me were mine. The next day, Lord Chetwynd, the ranger of my park, sent me a fine brace of carp out of my canal; and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynd's servant for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park."
We are not to suppose that the King delivered this speech in the smart good English of its reporter, or in any English; for he was not acquainted with the language. He and his Minister Sir Robert Walpole used to converse, even on the most important matters of state, in such Latin as their school recollections furnished, the Minister understanding German or French as little as the King did English.
His Majesty, in the first days of his new court, was more agreeably surprised one evening by the sudden return of Lady Mary Wortley to the party which were assembled in his rooms, and which she had somewhat strangely pleaded a previous engagement for quitting. She returned, borne in the arms of Mr. Secretary Craggs, junior, who had met her going away, and seized hold of the fugitive. He deposited her in the ante-room; but the doors of the presence-chamber being hastily thrown open by the pages, she found herself so astonished and fluttered that she related the whole adventure to the no less astonished king; who asked Mr. Craggs whether it was customary in England to carry ladies about "like sacks of wheat." "There is nothing," answered the adroit secretary, "which I would not do for your Majesty's satisfaction."
Towards the close of this monarch's reign, the future court historian, Horace Walpole, then a boy of ten years of age, had a longing "to see the King;" and as he was the son of the Minister, his longing was gratified in a very particular manner. A meeting was arranged on purpose the day before his Majesty took his last journey to Hanover:—
"My mother," says Walpole, "carried me at ten at night to the apartments of the Countess of Walsingham, on the ground floor, towards the garden of St. James's, which opened into that of her aunt the Duchess of Kendal's; apartments occupied by George the Second after his Queen's death, and by his successive mistresses, the Countesses of Suffolk and Yarmouth. Notice being given that the King was come down to supper, Lady Walsingham took me alone into the Duchess's ante-room, where we found alone the King and her. I knelt down and kissed his hand. He said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my mother. The person of the King is as perfect in my memory as if I saw him but yesterday. It was that of an elderly man, rather pale, and exactly like his pictures and coins, not tall, of an aspect rather good than august, with a dark tie-wig, a plain coat, waistcoat, and breeches, of snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue ribband over all. So entirely was he my object that I do not believe I once looked at the Duchess; but as I could not avoid seeing her on entering the room, I remember that just beyond his Majesty stood a very tall, lean, ill-favoured old lady."
This lady, the Duchess of Kendal, a German, was the king's lean mistress. The fat one, another German, whom he made Countess of Darlington, was "as corpulent and ample as the duchess was long and emaciated." Walpole, who gives this account of her, adds, that he remembered being "terrified" in his infancy at her enormous figure. She had "two fierce black eyes, large and rolling between two lofty arched eyebrows, two acres of cheeks spread with crimson, an ocean of neck," &c., "and no part restrained by stays." "It was not," says Horace, "till the last year or two of his reign, that this foreign sovereign paid the nation the compliment of taking openly an English mistress." This was Miss Brett, daughter of Savage's reputed mother the Countess of Macclesfield, by her second husband, Colonel Brett, whom we have seen, in our accounts of the Streets of London, keeping company with Addison. Miss Brett was a very lively and aspiring damsel. During the visit to Hanover just mentioned, she took it upon herself to break out a door from her apartments in St. James's Palace into the Royal garden. The eldest of the king's grand-daughters, also a very spirited person, ordered it to be closed up again. Miss Brett, more spirited, again broke it open, and we hear of the matter no further. But the king died on his journey, and the new mistress's empire was over.
The new King, George the Second, while Prince of Wales, had quarrelled with his father, and had been ordered to quit St. James's with all his household. Though a great formalist, he was also a great, and indeed somewhat alarming, pretender to gallantry, being of opinion, according to Lady Wortley Montagu, that men and women were created solely to be "kicked or kissed" by him at his pleasure. It is of him that stories were told of the King's cuffing his ministers, and kicking his hat about the room; and he is understood to be the King Arthur of Fielding's Tom Thumb. He had a wife, however, of some real pretensions to liveliness of mind, afterwards Queen Caroline, the friend of men of letters, and a very excellent wife too, for she was charitable to her husband's irregularities, and is said to have even shortened her life by putting her rheumatic legs into cold water in order to be able to accompany him in his walks. Here, in St. James's Palace, as well as at Kensington, she held her literary and philosophico-religious levees (being fond of a little theological inquiry); and here also she had brought together the handsomest and liveliest set of ladies in waiting ever seen on these sober-looking premises before or since. For, though Lady Winchelsea, the poetess, was among those of James the Second, the ladies about that sombre personage and his Queen seem, for the most part, to have been both dull and ugly. His first Queen, Anne Hyde, had been a maid of honour herself, and did not encourage the sisterhood; and his second Queen, the young and handsome Mary of Modena, who had heard of the doings at Whitehall when her husband was Duke of York, condescended to be jealous of him, in spite of their difference of years; James being comparatively an old gentleman, while she was not out of her teens. Indeed, he gave cause for the jealousy, and added no hopes of amendment; for being a Papist as well as a solemn gallant, he divided his time between the ugly mistresses he was fond of, and the priests who absolved him from the offence; an absolution that was superfluous, according to his brother Charles; the "merry monarch" having been of opinion that the mistresses themselves were penance enough.
George the Second's German mistress was a Baroness de Walmoden. On the death of Queen Caroline, he brought her over from Germany, and created her Countess of Yarmouth. She had two sons, the younger of whom was supposed to be the King's; and a ludicrous anecdote connected with the supposition and with the abode before us, is related of the famous Lord Chesterfield. On the countess's settlement in her state apartments, his lordship found one day in the palace ante-chamber a fair young gentleman, whom he took for the son in question. He was accordingly very profuse in his compliments. The shrewd lad received them all with a grave face, and then delightfully remarked, "I suppose your lordship takes me for 'Master Louis;' but I am only Sir William Russell, one of the pages." Chesterfield piqued himself on his discernment, particularly in matters of intercourse; and it is pleasant to catch the heartless man of "the graces" at a disadvantage that must have extremely mortified him.