The Court of George III and Queen Charlotte has often been characterized as a rather dull affair, a stark contrast to the more glitzy events on offer in the household of their son, the Prince of Wales. Just how ad hoc things might be is perhaps not quite as much appreciated. In the latest article for the Georgian Lords, Dr Robin Eagles considers Queen Charlotte’s hastily cobbled together Epiphany Ball, and what it reveals about the Court and royal family in the 1790s…

On 8 January 1794 the Morning Post ran a brief notice reporting on ‘The Queen’s ball and supper’, which had been held at Windsor Castle two days earlier, celebrating Epiphany. The king and queen had been accompanied by one of their younger sons, Prince Adolphus, at that point recovering from a heavy cold, and six princesses. There was dancing from nine till midnight before an ‘elegant supper’ was served, after which the dancing continued until three in the morning. On the 7th, the Daily Advertiser had also noticed the event, which it described as the queen’s ‘annual Supper and Ball’.

Neither notice was remarkable, just another in a long list of royal events that featured regularly throughout the year, punctuating the political calendar with prestigious celebrations at Court.

However, as was so often the case, what appeared on the surface to be an entirely predictable, carefully regulated festivity, had in fact been a rather hastily dreamt-up affair.

Unlike his grandfather, George II, George III had come to prefer Windsor as a residence over Hampton Court, and this was reflected in the royal family’s circuit between their London residences and Windsor, though by the 1790s they were as often to be found at the more domestic Windsor Lodge as in the castle itself which was reserved for mass entertaining and official ceremonial. The family’s movements over the festive period of 1793 to 1794 had followed this by now familiar routine. After a brief visit to London at the opening of 1794, the family had returned to Windsor on 3 January in good time to celebrate Epiphany, which remained a key part of the festive year.

This time, though, the so-called annual ball seems to have been something of an afterthought. This might seem the more surprising when one considers that Christmas and Epiphany entertainments had a long pedigree in the life of the Court and even under supposedly more austere regimes earlier in the century had attracted ‘a large number of people’. [Smith, 30] On this occasion, though, it was all rather last minute, prompting a certain amount of running around and putting everything in order. The day before the event, the queen had written to her treasurer, the earl of Ailesbury, explaining that the ‘impromptu ball’ had only been ‘cook’d up’ the previous afternoon, and that in the rush his daughter, Lady Frances Bruce, had been missed off the guest list. She insisted that Lady Frances was still welcome to attend and attempted to mitigate for the late notice by emphasizing that whatever she had to wear ‘in silk or muslin will do’. [Kassler, 77-78]

According to the queen’s own list of the 49 attendees present for the evening’s festivities, Lady Frances had clearly not been put out and had managed to find something for the evening, enabling her to attend. The queen may have spotted her omission, but the papers clearly were not interested and she failed to feature on a list of principal people at the event reported in the Oracle. The remainder were very much palace insiders, closely associated with the queen, like Earl Harcourt, the queen’s master of horse, the earl of Morton, her lord chamberlain, and the earl of Harrington, a dependable senior military figure, whose countess joined the queen’s bedchamber later in the year. However, if the guest list was rather select for a palace event and lacking in more prominent political characters, it did feature at least one future Prime Minister, Robert Banks Jenkinson, later 2nd earl of Liverpool.

What this small snapshot shows, in part, is the removal by this point – in part enforced because of the king’s recent illnesses – of the world of the Court from that of more frontline politics. In a sense, this could be seen as being part of a long process, that had been underway since the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty, though as Hannah Smith has shown the Court under George I and George II had continued to have an important role ‘as a “public” stage for enacting politics’ and was in no sense a ‘social desert’. [Smith, 26, 30] No senior ministers seem to have thought this was an event worth attending, or that the royal family wanted present. It was, if a wealthy one, very much a family affair, all part of a domestic Georgian Christmas.

However, what is also reveals is the central figure of Queen Charlotte. The principal courtiers present were members of her household, rather than the king’s, and it was she who apologized for overlooking guests who ought to have been invited. It may have been, in her view, a rather cobbled together event, not so very different from may have happened at a more modest level up and down the country, but it also pointed to her importance as Queen Consort holding her family together in a period of uncertainty. As such, then, it might be seen as an indication of something more significant than just another example of the domestic ‘Farmer George’ and his homespun queen playing together at Christmas.

RDEE

Further Reading:
Memoirs of the Court of George III: Volume IV, The Diary of Queen Charlotte, 1789 and 1794, ed. Michael Kassler (2015)
Hannah Smith, ‘The Court in England, 1714-1760: A Declining Political Institution?’ History xc (2005)