The Windsor Castle in which much of the action takes place is the castle before it was reconstructed in the 1820s. The eighteenth century wasn’t all elegance and there should be a marked contrast between the state rooms, in which the King’s life was largely spent, and the back parts of the building, those tiny rooms and attics, cubicles almost, where, because the court was so crowded, most of the courtiers had to lodge. This was certainly the situation at Versailles and, I imagine, at most of the courts of Europe. Greville is lucky to have a little room to himself and the pages sleep stacked in a cupboard like a scene from Alice in Wonderland.

It’s not simply a contrast between public opulence and private squalor. I don’t imagine the living quarters of the court, cramped though they were, to have been particularly squalid; I think of them as being long boarded passages lined with doors, with narrow staircases and abrupt changes of level … accommodation not unlike that in the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge or on the top floors of country houses. But scrubbed and white-painted as these quarters may have been, cramped they certainly were and often situated behind and adjacent to the state rooms and grand corridors where the ceremonial life of the court was led. Access to these back parts is through doors flush with the panelling or covered in camouflaging wallpaper; when Greville, say, comes on duty it’s as if he’s threading his way through a complicated backstage before coming out onto the set.

There should be a sense too that what happens to the King in the course of his illness is reflected in the topography of the castle. His behaviour, previously geared to the public and state rooms, gradually becomes inappropriate for such settings; when he periodically escapes into the back parts of the castle (as when he is looking for the Queen, for instance), it’s comparable to his escape into the back parts of his personality, the contrast between what he seems and what he is echoed by that between the state rooms and the attics.

The notion of courts as overcrowded places I took from Nancy Mitford’s The Sun King, with its vivid account of conditions at Versailles. Not to be at court in France was social death, and the aristocracy were prepared to put up with almost any inconvenience to avoid having to reside on their estates. In order to cope with the demand, rooms in the palace were divided and divided again, the elegant state apartments of the palace backing on to a labyrinth of poky lodgings and what were, in effect, bedsitters.