Wills and Kate: Part Two

Five months ago I wrote a post about William and Kate's dubious choice of Sir Martin Archer Shee's portrait of William IV as the backdrop to their engagement photocall. I suggested that William IV - who fathered ten illegitmate children with his mistress,  but failed to produce a legitimate  heir with his wife - was a poor role model for a couple planning marriage and children.

But here they are again, posing at the feet of another equally unsuitable sitter. This time it's Richard, Marquess Wellesley who enjoyed a ten year affair with the French actress Hyacinthe-Gabrielle Roland, only agreeing to marry her after the birth of three sons and two daughters. He later married Marianne Patterson but they had no children. 

With the marriage-shy, heirless spectres of William IV and Richard Wellesley hovering over their engagement and wedding day, I hope that Hugo Burnand's photograph of the bride and groom with their six bridesmaids and pageboys, more accurately predicts the couple's future.

The bridesmaids in their puffed silk are sweet, but the pageboys in Regency frock coats and frogging steal the shot.

The boys' distinctive poses come with excellent historical pedigrees. Tom Pettifer's insouciant sideways lounge recalls the pose adopted by Colonel Banastre Tarleton in Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portait of 1782. 

Painted to mark Tarleton’s return from the American War of Independence, Reynolds imagines the cavalry officer in the smoke and heat of battle. Fires blaze in the distance and Tarleton's horses rear in panic. Tarleton is unflustered and unfazed. He stands directly in the line of fire of a British canon and rests his left leg on a barrel of powder.

He has every right to look confident. Horace Walpole observed that Tarleton had 'butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody else in the army.' But the colonel didn't return from battle unscathed. Reynolds shows Tarleton missing two fingers on his right hand – an American battle wound.

Also adopting the pose of a battle-scarred hero, is second pageboy William Lowther-Pinkerton. With his right heel raised off the floor and his steady, direct gaze, he echoes John Hoppner's Horatio Nelson, painted in  1801 to mark the British victory at the Battle of Copenhagan. The vice-admiral’s empty sleeve is shown neatly pinned to his coat and he leans his good arm nonchalantly against a rock as the battle rages in the distance.

William Lowther-Pinkerton’s pose isn't a coincidence. Hoppner’s Nelson doesn’t languish in the collection of some provincial museum or stately home. He hangs immediately to the right of Shee’s William IV in the state rooms of St James’s Palace, right heel raised on the beach at Denmark.