Americans remain awed by the extravagance of the super-rich, oddly enticed and generally accepting of the fact that the monied elite have privileges that they use to their own advantage.

After the Hollywood celebrity and the professional athlete, the figure who invites the most curiosity is what is colloquially termed “powerbroker”. We’re talking about the dealmaker, the inside player – or in the words of Sade’s song, a “smooth operator”.

As an unelected class, this shadow group appears to exert undue control over decisions made and directions taken by those who technically wield power. One might imagine that the recent exposure of the “Epstein class” marks a new phenomenon, a perverse dynamic operating within circles in Washington and the upper echelons of the corporate world.

In fact, there is nothing at all new here. The same type held sway at America’s founding and throughout the Gilded Age. Indeed, their history reaches as far back as court politics in old-world aristocracies.

Who is this transhistorical figure? He (and every so often she) is the courtier.

The educated elite of America’s Revolutionary generation were schooled in Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528), which in turn informed popular guidebooks on manners, politeness and self-fashioning. George Washington admired Castiglione’s ideal of the “graceful warrior” and saw him personified in the “thorough paced courtier”, Lord William Howe, the blue-blooded commander of the British army in North America.

Titled diplomats belonged to this unofficial club as well. As Washington’s aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton described the French minister Chevalier de La Luzerne as one who “makes the point of being pleased with everything he sees”. The Frenchman’s “dexterity” wooed his allies; his maneuvering appeared effortless.

The courtier’s image was doubled-edged. Admired for his polished manners, he might also be reviled for exuding style over substance. To the critical eye of John Adams, who observed plenty of courtiers as a senior diplomat abroad, they were little more than sycophants, fawning on “great men in order to obtain their smiles, Esteem and Patronage and consequently their favours and Preferments”.

Yet the courtier quickly became a regular fixture at the courtly levees of presidents Washington and Adams. The celebrated Dolley Madison was far from the only first lady who accommodated herself to (and herself played) the patronage game.

Hamilton, after his appointment as........

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