Dan Snow's History Hit - Kensington Palace: Serving the Royal Court

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Kensington Palace was the centre of court life in 18th-century Britain. It was the principal London residence for the Royals, as well as a lavish venue for hosting monarchs and world leaders. But behind this very public world existed an entirely obscured one, made up of a small army of people who kept the royal show on the road.Dan is joined by Dr. Mishka Sinha, Curator for Inclusive History at Historic Royal Palaces and Co-Curator of the ‘Untold Lives: A Palace at Work’ exhibition at Kensington Palace, open until October, 2024. Mishka tells us all about the staff of the Georgian court, and what we can learn from the objects they left behind.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Book your tickets now for the Untold Lives exhibition at Kensington Palace here.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. A couple of weeks ago I went off to Kensington Palace, which was the principal London, even though it was slightly west of London, the principal London seat of the English and British royal family from the late Stuart, so from William III and his co-regent, his wife, Mary, all the way through to the purchase of Buckingham Palace and the grand refurbishment by George IV. So for the best bit of British history, folks, the long 18th century, Kensington Palace was the place to be. It was the centre of court life in Britain. It's still the Royal Palace to this day.

People will be familiar with the various lurid reports of life in Kensington Palace from the books and the podcasts and the TV show of Harry, Prince Henry. It's where he spent his childhood, his mother Diana lived. It's where people left massive amounts of flowers when she was tragically killed in Paris. Nearly two centuries earlier, it's where Queen Victoria was born. It is a wonderful place to visit. It's a wonderful place to think about British and royal history. It was bought for the royal family in 1689 because William III, having come over from Holland, having kicked his predecessor and his father-in-law, Awkward, off the throne, James II, he didn't want to live in Whitehall Palace. He didn't want to live in the centre of London because it was too

smelly and noisy and smoggy and smoky. And he had bad lungs. He was famously asthmatic, so he purchased this house perched on slightly higher ground to the west of London, and that became Kensington Palace. Christopher Wren gave it a once-over and made it magnificent. When William and Mary died, and Mary's sister Anne eventually died without an heir, the crown passed with some controversy to the Hanoverian line. George I. To get to George, you had to skip over dozens of more eligible Catholics, people with better claims to the throne, candidates. But Parliament decreed it had to go to a Protestant, and so George was elevated from Elector of Hanover, so from a relatively minor German royal, to King of Britain, Ireland, and Britain's colonies beyond the seas. In this podcast, I want to talk about a brilliant exhibition I saw in the palace, and that is

not about the kings and the queens, but about the people who kept the show on the road. And there were many of them. At times, around about a thousand people worked in and around Kinson and Palace. They were the people who literally wiped the bum, wiped the backside of the king after he'd completed his morning toilet. There were people who perhaps had a slightly more pleasant job, had to catch rats, had to turn meat, keep the vast stables in good condition, rats, turn meat, keep the vast stables in good condition, light and turn out lamps, clean, serve meals. It was a truly epic enterprise. Those are people traditionally that have been left out of the historical narrative, but now the team at Historic World Palaces have done their best to make sure they are commemorated in that space alongside the people they served.

Co-curating this new exhibition, Untold Lives, is Mishka Sinha. She took me on the exhibition and she joined me on this podcast to talk me through it. Make sure you get yourself down to Kensington Palace. It's a cracker. Enjoy the pod. T-minus 10. The Thomas bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower.

Mishka, great to have you on the podcast. Hello, it's great to be here. So, how should we think about Kensington Palace? There's so many palaces in Britain. People will be familiar with Hampton Court and Windsor and all these places. What's going on with Kensington in, let's say, the 18th century? Is it more central to the royal story than other palaces people have heard of? I think at this point, Kensington is a palace.

It's important to this important transition, which is the beginning of William and Mary's reign. And that's quite a big changeover because when William exceeds the throne of England, they kind of make a deal, basically, which limits the powers of the monarch and increases the powers of parliament. And William and Mary expand what is in a house into a palace. And so Kensington really becomes a palace at that point. And that is why it's sort of a centre for what we're talking about here. It's also, you know, they do live there quite a lot. They do spend a reasonable amount of time there, although the Royal Household does move around, you know, across various of the

palaces, Whitehall, St. James's Palace, although Whitehall burns down. Tragically, with the loss of Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation notes and maps, which is something I regularly get sad about. So Whitehall burns down, Kensington becomes their kind of, do we call it a London residence, even though at the time it was a bit west of London? Yeah, it's outside London. And you have actually complaints, we have records of letters and complaints from servants having to get to the palace and the amount of time it takes and how they don't get to eat their meals in time and how much it costs to get to Kensington. So clearly it's not that close. Right. Well, that's a very good point. So not everyone lives in. This is not a live-in job. How many servants? What was the size of the serving team?

I mean, we're calling them servants because that's historically correct for the time. Obviously, that's not a word we would use now. But we have three sort of sets of servants, as it were. You have the upper servants, and you have the lower servants, and you have those who are under the master of the horse. So at the top end of the number of staff that you have, at the beginning of this period, which is Charles II, 1660, you're looking at sort of about 1500 all told, and that's not all living. And then, you know, it reduces over time, and we go all the way until the beginning of the 19th century to George IV, and that reduces to about half that number.

So at its height, the number of staff is pretty large and the court is pretty large as well. I'm in shock to hear that George IV had a smaller staff than other monarchs. I thought it would have ballooned when he was in charge. Yeah, I don't know. I think that this is also to do with the way that Parliament's powers are growing and the power they have to control how much the it gets to spend. It kept on a tighter leash as the century went on. And when I was walking around the palace with you, I was just loving the descriptions of some of these servants. Like obviously, so at the very top, you'd have the Lord Chamberlain,

who's an aristocrat who's sort of running a portion of the household. But as we go down, what kind of jobs, what kind of people are we talking about here? household. But as we go down, what kind of jobs, what kind of people are we talking about here? So in the upper house, the Lord Chamberlain is the head of the upper servants. And at the bottom of those, I think, are people who kind of, say, for example, clean the privy chambers, so the innermost chambers where the monarchs occupy. So liveried servants are generally lower than servants who don't have liveries. Obviously, right at the bottom, you have people who have no liveries. But then people like footmen are liveried servants, and they're not allowed to access the interiors of the palace, for example. And just quickly, what does livery mean? Is that just literally what they're all wearing?

They're uniforms. So like, for example, if you come to the exhibition, you'd see this wonderful uniform that we have from the 18th century, which is actually from Hanover. But it is exactly like the kind of livery footman would have worn in England at the time. It's just that we don't have ours anymore. And in Hanover, they retained their uniforms. And it's glorious. It's red and gold, and it's made with real gold thread. And it's incredibly valuable. And we know that it's valuable and treasured because it's passed down from footman to footman. And we know that because we have the names of at least three footmen who used it inscribed into the inside arm of the coat. So livery is these sort of grand uniforms, but they're really like walking flags,

as one of our curators, Sebastian Edwards, who's the other curator on this exhibition, calls it, you know, he says they're kind of walking flags. So they're ciphers and the uniform is what matters. And they can't access the inner chambers. And so under the lower chamberlain, you have people out, you have gentlemen ushers who are sort of middling servants. And then you have people who clean the privy chambers. So people like the necessary woman. And then under the lower servants, so those are under the Lord Steward. And right at the bottom, you have people like turnbrochers who are very poorly paid. Some of

them aren't paid at all if they are sort of turnbrochers extraordinary. So they come in and do kind of a little bit of extra work. And what's a turnbroch? So a turnbroch is essentially somebody who turns the spit on which the large meat are roasted. And so turn broaches, turn the meat and make sure it's roasted. I think they probably do other things as well, but that's what they're named for. And they are very menial jobs. And they are in the 18th century, they're eventually replaced by the invention of something called a spit jack, which is a kind of mechanical object, which you can kind of wind up and it keeps going for a while. But the really large pieces of meat, those can't really be turned

by spitjacks. And so you still need turn brooches for those. But yeah, that's what a turn brooch is. And that's a pre-industrialization job, if ever I heard one. So you sit there on a stool all day, turning the meat relentlessly to make sure that it's evenly cooked. If they get that wrong, they're going to get a clout around the ear from the chef. Or they get thrown out, which is worse. It's a hand-to-mouth existence for many of them. Yes, that's interesting. Even at the royal court, wages, employment, it's very insecure. It is very insecure. And especially during the stewards, particularly towards the later period, there are periods during which servants are just not paid. And you have, for example,

a petition from a group of servants and tradesmen who complain at the end of the 17th century of not having been paid for 16 months. And they say they're reduced to poverty and nearly starving, and they need to be paid, and they're not going to be able to serve or provide their majesties any longer if they're not paid. I tell you what, they shouldn't feel that bad because the Stuarts never paid anybody. With my naval history hat on, I mean, jeepers creepers. Why do you think the Dutch were able to sail up the Medway and burn the navy at their anchors? But anyway, we digress. Tell me about some other roles. I love hearing about them. You mentioned a rat catcher last time I was in the palace. Yes. So we have a rat killer. They're very sort of blunt

about this. Rat killer, because that's what they did. They killed rats. Rat killers are really important because the royal rat killer is in charge of killing all of the vermin in all of the palaces. And we have quite a few palaces. We have Hampton Court, Windsor, Whitehall, Kensington. It's quite an important job. They're well paid. And they also have a really nice livery, which is made of crimson cloth with blue velvet and embroidered in the arms with rats and wheat sheaves. At least one of these rat killers was a woman in the 18th century, a woman called Elizabeth Stubbs. She may have inherited the job from either her father or her husband, or perhaps her brother, because we also have someone called Samuel Stubbs before her. And she was a world rat killer. And

when she died, there was a notice, an obituary that says that her place was worth £100 a year. So quite well paid. So it's an important job. The other one, rather than murdering mammals, comes from nurturing them. I was very interested in the status of the wet nurse. It seems like that's an important person in the royal court. So in the late 17th and 18th centuries, aristocratic women did not generally breastfeed their own children. They hired wet nurses. And this was for a variety of reasons. Some of it was that if they were nursing, they couldn't then continue the attempts to produce male heir, for example,

because they weren't supposed to be having conjugal relations while they were breastfeeding and various other reasons. That continues to be a debate and by the beginning of the 19th century, it's changing. But essentially the queens don't breastfeed their own children and so they hire wet nurses

and the wet nurses are clearly very important because they breastfeed their own children. And so they hire wet nurses and the wet nurses are clearly very important because they suckle the royal children, they breastfeed the royal children, they're providing the sustenance. And they don't have to be aristocrats themselves, but they do have to be healthy. They do have to be pleasant and they do have to be discreet because they have access to these very private chambers and these very private lives. And during that period, they are really not supposed to be in contact with their own friends and family. They're not supposed to be having sex, basically. And often because they're lactating, they obviously have children of their own, but they're not supposed to be feeding their own

children. And so they're often hiring their own wet nurses to look after their children while they're living in the palace. So for example, Queen Charlotte, George III's wife, is very specific about what they're supposed to wear. She wants the wet nurse to wear the same kinds of things she wears, presumably because she wants her babies to be in contact with this material, or perhaps she wants them to identify the wet nurse with her. It's not uniform. So we know that Queen Caroline, that is George II's wife, did nurse her own children. And we also know that Victoria's mother was adamant about breastfeeding Victoria, which was considered quite eccentric in her. They would become, well, inevitably because of the bonding with the infant, it seems

like they became quite important characters at court and indeed would go on to different jobs after that role had come to an end. That's right. You know, we have examples of people like Anne Percy, who stays on and becomes governess to Queen Charlotte's children. And clearly, she is valued by the royal family and by the Queen and the children and she's given various keepsakes to keep. Locks of hair belonging to the children and things like a measuring tape which has the names of the royal children and their heights. Keepsakes that are very personal to the royal family that she gets to keep and pass on to her descendants. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. we'll talk about Kensington Palace and all the people who worked in there. More coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. another perhaps surprising servant is well one that's achieved notoriety at the time in some famous sense tell me about george i when george i comes over from hanover from germany he brings two servants

in particular that sort of shake things up a bit in the English court, the British court. Yes. George I comes over from Hanover and he brings a large group of servants with him and they're all the way from the kind of top ranks to kind of the bottom ranks, people in the kitchen. And we know that, say, for example, you have records saying that the Hanoverian grooms of the bedchamber and the Hanoverian servants, they have, the upper servants, they get to have 17 bottles of wine four times a year. And then later on, there's a kind of question about it, but they're allowed to keep that allowance. So clearly, you know, they're favoured. And for that reason as well, they are resented by the English servants.

But amongst this, you know this large range of staff, he has two men in particular who are his body servants. They're kind of amongst the closest servants to him. So they're fairly menial positions in that they're not like the grooms of the bedchamber who tend to be aristocrats, but they are, because of their physical proximity to the king, they have a great deal of de facto power in the court. And access to the king means they have certain kinds of really important currency like gossip that they can pass on that other people don't have. And royal gossip is incredibly important. Everybody wants to know what's going on. And these two men were, in fact, from the Ottoman Empire. They were probably taken as prisoners of war from what is

now modern day Greece, the Peloponnese, Peloponnesian Peninsula, that was then governed by the Ottomans, and they ended up in Hanover. So they're probably taken prisoner soon after the siege of Vienna, when the Ottoman Empire has lost that, its power is a little bit in abeyance, particularly in the Moria, as that region is known in the Peloponnese. And the Hanoverian army is one of the European armies that set the siege of Vienna and then ends up with these two men. And they then go back to Hanover and they join the court of George Prince Elector, as he is then, of Hanover.

And one of them, Mehmet, is the older, he's the elder, and he possibly comes from the governor's family. He may have been a son of the actual Ottoman governor. He rises quite high through the ranks in George's court. And then the second man joins the court about 20 years later. But they're both there in Hanover at the time when George comes over to England in 1714 and they come with him. And they are his body servants, his valet de chambre. They attend to him in his privy chambers. And he is very keen on keeping them very close to him. He doesn't like speaking English. He likes speaking German and French, which they can both speak. And he keeps them very close to him.

And they have intimate access to him and to his body, in a sense, because they are attending to him in all kinds of quite intimate duties. And Mehmed, for example, the older, amongst other things, he checks the king's hemorrhoids, which are quite bad, and reports to the royal physicians. Mehmed also rises to become basically in charge of the king's expenses. He's the person who disperses the payments for the king's weeks and his clothes, his personal garments, his subscription to the theater. So he becomes quite an important personage, while Mustafa remains kind of less

important. But when Mehmed finally dies, which is a year before the king in 1726, Mustafa takes his place and he is with the king when the king dies. And again, is able to tell the royal physicians that the king went to the loo in the night before his death, and so he doesn't have to be purged. Crikey. I mean, good luck to these guys, but if that's your way to riches and preferment, then I mean, that's a tough slog. Mehmet married a white German Christian woman, and so they were an interracial couple at the court of George I, which is thought to be the first well-known case in modern British history. Yeah, it's probably the first case of court that we know of in the English court, although it's not unfamiliar in Hanover. So both men marry women from Hanover.

Both men marry Christian Teutonic women, and both appear to have quite happy, secure marriages. Their marriages last. Mehmet marries a woman called Marie Hedwig Wedekind. Her father is a brewer and a merchant, a burgher of Hanover, fairly well-respected, well-established. And she brings with her, according to Mehmet's will, considerable portion, as it's called. So she brings quite a lot of money with her. And they have several children together, of whom I think about three survive, two boys and a girl. And Mehmet's will, we know a little bit about Mehmet's will because it was published after his death in England by a man called Curl, who is a dubious figure, but it seems to match up with what we know of Mehmet. up with what we know of Emmett. And the will talks about Marie, talks about how, you know, she's always been devoted to him and how he values their marriage. And he places his sons sort of, if he should die before their sons attain their majority, that she would be, you know,

in charge of them, their education. Really, she's kind of put in charge of his finances. He says explicitly that she has access to all of his wealth, which is considerable at this time, because he is ennobled by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1716 at George's request, given property in Hanover, house in Schmitt Street, in Schmittstrasse, and is reasonably wealthy man at his death. And he explicitly states that Marie has access to all of this money without having to account for it. But she should see to her son's education out of that. If she should marry again, she should be able to take with her the money she brought with her into the marriage. He's clearly thinking quite carefully about her and, you know, what happens to her after his death. Tell me about, speaking of attending very closely to the king's

body, there's a very, very fine, do we call it a commode in the exhibition? I mean, there's a velvet-covered chair on which the king sat, there's a hole in it through which you can do your business. Yes, I think it's called a stool closet. It looks like a box. It has a lid, a lockable lid. That's the way the word stool comes from. So it's a stool. It's literally a stool, but it's closed on all sides. The top is a velvet cushion, essentially with a hole in it for the king to sit on and basically go to the toilet. You know, you could move it around. So there was a person in charge of attending to the king when he sat there on the toilet. And that was a person of considerable

importance, an aristocrat. In the case of William III, it would have been the Earl of Portland, Bentinck. One of his Dutch friends. Yes. And he would have stood there and given the king pieces of linen to wipe his bottom or perhaps wipe the king's bottom himself. But this was considered a great privilege. And so that was reserved for somebody of importance. But the item itself would have been cleaned by a woman called a necessary woman. So the necessary woman or necessary women were in charge of cleaning these toilets.

But the necessary woman to the king would have charge of cleaning these toilets. But the necessary woman to the king would have been the most important of the necessary women and the best paid. And our exhibition starts with one of these necessary women, because we have a wonderful portrait of her painted when she was in her 90s, a woman called Bridget Holmes. And she served four monarchs, Bridget Holmes. And she served four monarchs, Charles I, Charles II, James II, and William III. She was his necessary woman, William III. And she lived to be 100 years old and was eventually buried in Westminster Abbey, along with several other favoured menial servants. It's very interesting that William III just inherited the necessary woman of his father-in-law, cousin and uncle, James II, who he kicked off the throne. It's funny.

He didn't just inherit the throne, he obviously inherited a lot of these kind of more menial domestic servants as well. Yes, several of the domestic servants are inherited and we have examples of domestic servants petitioning William III, saying that they lost their positions to Catholics under James II, and could they please have their jobs back, and things like that, or could they kind of be compensated? So clearly, they continue in service, in royal service. There are so many wonderful exhibitions that I've seen at the Palace about, well, I love the one about Georgian queens, for example, these very, very important overlooked women in the 18th century, who I did think so much to define modern monarchy. But they're much easier, presumably, than your job, which is trying to find out about the people whom the historians and the archivists have sometimes chosen to overlook. I mean, how can you get at these people?

to overlook? I mean, how can you get at these people? It is a difficult task. And, you know, that's one of the challenges of doing an exhibition like this, but it's also one of the really exciting things because we get to explore the stories, stories that people don't know very well, stories that we can bring out and we can talk about sometimes for the first time. They're also stories that sometimes we don't have details of. We have a sense of what's going on. We have names without faces or faces without names. And there we get to use our imagination and our ingenuity and creativity. And one of the things we've done with this exhibition that's been really wonderful has been to collaborate with contemporary artists, particularly where we have, as I said, names with no faces or faces with no

names, people who tend to get lost to history, who are subject to what E.P. Thompson called the enormous condescension of posterity, I think. And we get to bring them back. People like Bridget Holmes, it's relatively easy, even though she's a menial servant, we actually have this wonderful portrait of her which is commissioned really in recognition of her very long service. It's such a magnificent portrait because it shows her standing there with this drape behind her being pulled aside by a young boy in livery. And it shows the kind of the range of ages that serve the royal court. And it's quite playful. You know, she's shaking her broom at this little boy. And you know something about it, we have records.

We have household account books that tell us how much people were paid. We have letters sometimes in the National Archives. We have, the Royal Archives have some records. We have something called the Court of the Verge, which is a sort of internal court where there are kind of minor misdemeanors, where they're tried by their peers. And so you have little stories about them. So there are ways in which we can bring together some of these details. But then you have people like the young boy on the King's Staircase, who is a young black boy, and he seems to be climbing

over the railing. And we don't know who he is. And we know that there were people from enslaved backgrounds around from the time, certainly of William III, because we know that there were people from enslaved backgrounds. I call them people from enslaved backgrounds because their status in both the Dutch court and the British court is not always clear and changes over time. But we have these people in the Court of Orange, the House of Orange, and we have this young man in George I's court, which he has painted on the king's staircase by William Kent in the early years of his reign, and we don't know who he is. And what we did was we

commissioned an artist called Peter Braithwaite, who's an opera singer. That's his day job. He started to do this wonderful series of works during the pandemic where he looks at Black portraiture, portraits of Black people in Western art and in medieval art, Renaissance art, and 18th century art. And he creates contemporary versions of those people using himself and his body. He kind of embodies them and using modern clothing and comparative designs and colors to talk to these people, to create a correspondence, to create a communication. And that's what he's done for us. He's recreated this young boy and he's also recreated at the same time. So in the same painting on that staircase, we have on the ceiling a representation

of a black trumpeter. We have a long history, a tradition of black trumpeters. It's quite a respected profession, all the way at least from Henry VIII. And we know that there's one, a black trumpeter in London around this time called John Brano, John Baptiste Brano. It could have been him, or it could have been someone he taught. And he's on the ceiling, blowing his trumpet. And what Peter Braithwaite has done is he's got this little boy climbing over this railing, holding in his hand a toy trumpet, as though he's climbing towards the trumpet and has perhaps taken his trumpet, or he's uniting the two figures and bringing them to life for us so that they don't disappear into history, but force us to reckon with them.

Well, thank you very much indeed for forcing us to reckon with them. Tell people how they can go and see this exhibition. Well, come to Kensington Palace. Yeah, the exhibition's on until the end of October and we'd love you to come. Well, thank you very much indeed. Go and check it out, everybody. you