With many settling back into university terms, in the latest post for the Georgian Lords, we welcome early career researcher, Amanda Westcott, considering the importance of court life beyond London for George III and Queen Charlotte. This included a welcome visit to Oxford University following the Margaret Nicholson episode of 1786.

In August 1786, just outside the entrance to St James’s Palace, a woman by the name of Margaret Nicholson attempted to assassinate George III with a blunt dessert knife. Under the guise of presenting the king with a petition, Margaret lunged toward him with her blade, which George avoided before members of his retinue stepped in to restrain her.

While poor Margaret was afterwards committed to Bedlam Hospital, George took this opportunity to celebrate his fateful escape – first rushing back to Windsor to reassure his consort, Queen Charlotte, of his safety and then deciding on a royal visit to Oxford. The first half of the decade had proved very troublesome for the king: his ministers conceded to negotiations for ending the American War in 1783, effectively relinquishing British control of the American colonies. George also had to face the rather tedious process of reform of the royal household around the same time, which he found to be yet another show of imposition and instability among his ministers.

The 1786 assassination attempt presented an opportunity for George not only to distance himself further in the public eye from the failings of his government but also to continue cultivating and mobilizing a court circle away from London. This network of courtiers was distinct from Westminster politicians, though many of them held seats in the House of Lords and were fashionable members of the aristocracy. Their social ambitions instead sought to uphold duties of attendance and the formation of a resourceful and ceremonious retinue which (at very short notice) could replicate a court drawing room anywhere outside of St James’s Palace. This was increasingly useful to a king who had become rather restless with his commute between London and Kew and was frequently venturing further west.

The 1786 royal visit was the third successive visit that George and Charlotte had made into Oxfordshire: the two previous summers, they had travelled to the country house of their favoured courtiers, Lord and Lady Harcourt. George Simon Harcourt, 2nd Earl Harcourt, and his wife Elizabeth, were regular attendees at court and both granted offices in the queen’s household. Countess Harcourt was first asked to replace the duchess of Argyll as a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte in 1784. Harcourt eventually took up his father’s original post as the queen’s Master of the Horse in 1790.

Lord and Lady Harcourt were ready and eager to host another royal visit to their Palladian villa at Nuneham, which had been built by the first Earl Harcourt in the 1750s, designed by the architect Stiff Leadbetter. Between 1779 and 1782, the second earl had employed Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to undertake an elaborate renovation of his father’s house and landscape garden. These changes made for a spacious, though labyrinth-like, construction that the novelist Frances Burney described in 1786 as ‘one of those straggling, half new, half old, half comfortable & half forlorn Mansions, that are begun in one generation, & finished in another.’ [Burney, Court Journals, i. 94.] George and Charlotte nevertheless became very fond of this fashionable country house, which was notable for its situation on the Thames and a famous flower garden designed by the English poet William Mason.

Having received the royal family several times in such a unique capacity, the Harcourts were well-versed in the details of attendance. Their correspondence reveals meticulous arrangements for receiving the king and queen, from table settings to the types of chairs they would require. The court formality of St James’s reigned even in the countryside, and the same ceremony that George and Charlotte came to expect at Nuneham was amplified on the occasion of the king’s journey up the road to Oxford.

One particularly vivid account of the 1786 royal visit was penned by Burney, who had been recruited (in the absence of a preferment for her father, the composer Charles Burney) as Queen Charlotte’s Assistant Keeper of the Robes. Not being permitted to write novels while employed by the queen, Burney turned her sharp authorial eye to the events in Oxford, and her descriptions highlight the significance of the Harcourts and wider circle of attending aristocratic courtiers, who facilitated the strict ceremonial that royalty demanded.

Sunday 13 August 1786 saw the king, queen, their three eldest daughters, and a large retinue enter the Sheldonian Theatre to attend a Thanksgiving address held by the University. The country-house hosts were temporarily made the principal courtiers in waiting for the occasion: Harcourt acted as lord chamberlain, standing in attendance directly behind the monarch, formally presenting the king’s speech, and afterwards introducing guests. Burney’s representation of this new ‘Court Scenery’ emphasizes with the adaptation of court office the primary importance of etiquette.

However prepared his courtiers might have been, Burney described an ill-equipped (but no less deferential) audience of dons at the Sheldonian:

Notwithstanding this considerable good nature in his Majesty, the sight, at times, was very ridiculous: Some of the worthy Collegiates, unused to such ceremonies, & unaccustomed to such a presence, the moment they had kissed the King’s Hand, turned their backs to him, & walked away as in any common Room; others, attempting to do better, did still worse, by tottering & stumbling, & falling foul of those behind them;—some, ashamed to kneel, took the King’s Hand strait up to their Mouths; others, equally off their guard, plumpt down on both knees, & could hardly get up again: & many, in their confusion, fairly arose by pulling His Majesty’s Hand to raise them. [Burney, Court Journals, i. 115.]

Travel, thus, did not prevent George from holding court outside of St James’s Palace. With the dutiful attendance of his courtiers, the king was able to recreate settings akin to a London drawing room. Burney’s account, for instance, details the purposeful way in which, while afterwards visiting an Oxford college, George and Charlotte seated themselves at the head of a room:

… nothing could exceed the celerity with which all confusion instantly was over, & the most solemn order succeeded to it,—chairs were instantly presented to the three Princesses, by the side of the Queen, & the Duchess of Ancaster & Lady Harcourt planted themselves at their backs; while Lady Charlotte [Bertie] instantly retreated back, close to the wall, & so did every creature else in the Room, all according to their Rank or Station, & the Royal Family remained conspicuous & alone, all crowd dispersed. [Burney, Court Journals, i. 126.]

It was ‘back to school’ in more ways than one: George was not simply convening his court in Oxford; he was also exercising well-established ceremonial in the wake of an assassination attempt and a very challenging period of disruption to his rule. The attendance of his courtiers was an important display of royal authority, which would prove to be an especially valuable resource just two years later, at the end of 1788, when he was fully incapacitated by illness. These same attendants – the Harcourts chief among them – shielded him at Kew throughout the Regency Crisis and supported his consort. George’s very first trip to university in 1786, however, received full marks. Burney noted that there was not ‘one dry Eye in the Theatre’ during the University’s address to the king that day.

AW

Further reading:

Harcourt, Edward William, ed. The Harcourt Papers. Vols. 1–12 (Oxford: printed for private circulation by J. Parker and Co., 1880)

Sabor, Peter, ed. The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (2014). Vol. 1. 1786 (Oxford, 2011)