Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2014

Copyright © Janice Hadlow 2014

Janice Hadlow asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Cover image: Queen Charlotte, 1779 (oil on canvas) by West, Benjamin (1738–1820)/Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015/Bridgeman Images

Source ISBN: 9780007165193

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780008102203

Version: 2015-06-29

Frontispiece

George III, Queen Charlotte and six princesses (watercolour, attributed to William Rought)

Dedication

FOR MARTIN, ALEXANDER AND LOUIS,

AND FOR MY PARENTS, WHO DID NOT LIVE TO READ IT

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Frontispiece

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraphs

Family Tree

Prologue

1 The Strangest Family

2 A Passionate Partnership

3 Son and Heir

4 The Right Wife

5 A Modern Marriage

6 Fruitful

7 Private Lives

8 A Sentimental Education

9 Numberless Trials

10 Great Expectations

11 An Intellectual Malady

12 Three Weddings

13 The Wrong Lovers

14 Established

Notes

Picture Section

Illustration Credits

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

WHEN QUEEN CHARLOTTE WAS ASKED by the artist, botanist and diarist Mrs Delany why she had appointed the writer Fanny Burney to the post of assistant dresser in her household, she answered with characteristic clarity: ‘I was led to think of Miss Burney first by her books, then by seeing her, then by hearing how much she was loved by her friends, but chiefly by her friendship for you.’ If questioned about why I wrote this book, I am not sure I could answer with such confident precision. In one sense, it simply crept up on me, emerging from a long love affair with the period and the people who lived in it.

I have always been fascinated by history. I studied it at university, where I was taught by some exceptional and inspiring teachers. As a television producer, I have made many history programmes, covering all aspects of the past – from the ancient world to times within living memory. I have worked with some of the most eminent British historians, witnessing at first-hand their knowledge and passion for a huge variety of subject areas. But it was always the eighteenth century that had first place in my heart. I had immersed myself in the politics of the period at college, but its appeal went far beyond what my reading delivered for me. Like so many others, I was drawn to it partly by the wonderful things made in it: the incomparable architecture that created austerely elegant palaces for the great, and airy, comfortable homes for the ‘middling sort’. I coveted the objects that went into these houses, from the sturdily beautiful furniture to the delicate blue-and-white coffee cups intended to sit proudly on all those much-polished tea tables. I admired the art of the period too, especially the portraiture, whether it was the clear-eyed intensity of Allan Ramsay, the bravura gestures of Joshua Reynolds, or the tender luminosity of Thomas Gainsborough. Those eighteenth-century men and women rich enough to afford it never tired of having themselves painted. If I had been one of them, I would have chosen Thomas Lawrence for my portrait. Who wouldn’t want to see themselves through Lawrence’s humane yet flattering eye, which infused even the most unpromising sitter with a sense of spirit and passion? I would have worn a red velvet dress, as both princesses Caroline and Sophia did when they sat for Lawrence, and hoped for a similarly impressive result: both women gaze directly out from their pictures, proud, commanding and smoulderingly bold. The portraits do not quite capture their true characters, at least as revealed in their letters; but what an image to look upon when your spirits needed a boost.

But much as I responded to the things the period produced, my real desire was to understand the people who lived in it. It was the men and women of what is often called the long eighteenth century – which runs from the accession of George I in 1714 to the death of George IV in 1830 – who really captivated me. Caught between the religious intensity of the seventeenth century and the earnest high-mindedness of the Victorians, this was a society in which I felt very much at home. I enjoyed its bustle and energy, and liked being in the company of its garrulous, argumentative and emotional inhabitants. The contradictions of their world intrigued me. On the one hand, they loved order, politeness, restraint. On the other, they were loud, forthright and often violent. The sedate drawing rooms of the rich looked out onto streets where passions could and did run very high. The poor, in both town and country, had a tough time of it, although they too seem to have shared something of the assertive confidence of the wealthy. For most of the middling sort, however, and especially for the rich, there was good reason to be bullish. This was a period in which there was money to be made, and a new kind of life to be lived. It is the experiences of these people – those who built the houses, big and small, laid out the gardens, commissioned the pictures, bought the furniture – that I have come to know best.

I knew them first by their books, and above all, through the work of Jane Austen. My earliest encounters with the authentic voice of the time came through her novels; the first eighteenth-century people I felt I really knew were the Bennetts of Longbourn, the Elliots of Kellynch Hall, Admiral and Mrs Croft, Mr Elton and his dreadful wife.

From fiction, it was a short jump to the world of real people. I think I began with James Boswell’s London Journal. That was my introduction to the vast and compelling world of eighteenth-century diaries and correspondence in which I have been happily immersed ever since. There are two reasons why I love nothing better than a collection of letters or a lengthy journal. Firstly, I’m gripped by the unfolding human story they capture, the narrative of real life as it is actually lived, the biggest events pressed hard up against the small details of the everyday round, matters of love and marriage, birth and death interspersed with accounts of dinner parties and shopping trips, the ups and downs of relationships, the likes and dislikes, triumphs and failures that are the stuff of all human experience. I always want to know what happened next, how things turned out. Did the marriage for which everyone had planned and schemed take place? Was it a success? Did the baby that seemed so sickly survive? Did the business venture prosper? Was a husband ever found for the awkward youngest sister, or a profession for the lacklustre youngest son?

Secondly, I so enjoy the way the letter- and diary-writers tell their stories. The eighteenth-century voice, in its most formal mode, can be stately and remote; but in more relaxed correspondence, the prevailing tone is quite different. Letters between family and friends have an immediacy and a directness that rarely fail to engage the reader. Educated eighteenth-century writers were extremely candid: there were few subjects that they considered off limits. They were intensely interested in themselves and their own concerns, thinking nothing of filling page after page with detailed analyses of their health, their thoughts, and the nature of their relationships, marital, professional or political. They were tremendous gossips. Some of them were also very funny, caustic, satiric, masters (and mistresses) of an ironic tone that feels very modern in its knowingness and is still able to raise a smile after so many years.

It is very easy, reading their letters, to feel that the people who wrote them are just like us. For me, that is part of the appeal of the period, and it is, to some extent, true. But in other ways, the reality of their lives is almost impossible for contemporary readers to appreciate. In the midst of a world that seems so sophisticated and so recognisable, eighteenth-century people encountered on a daily basis experiences which would horrify a modern sensibility. Outside the well-managed homes of the better-off, extremes of poverty and the brutal and degrading treatment of the powerless and vulnerable were everywhere to be found. Even the richest families lived with the constant spectre of sickness, pain and death and could not protect themselves against the disease that decimated a nursery, the accident that felled a promising young man or the complications that killed a mother in childbirth. There is a drumbeat of darkness in all the correspondence of this period that makes a modern reader pause to give thanks for penicillin and anaesthesia.

Many of the letter-writers who so assiduously chronicled the ebb and flow of family life were women. Then, as is perhaps still the case now, it was women who worked hardest to cement the social relationships that held scattered families and friends together. One of the ways they did this was by writing to everyone in their social circle, passing on news, advice and scandal, describing their feelings and speculating on the motives and emotions of those around them. This sprawling world of the family, especially the lives of women and children, is the territory I have always found most compelling. I am fascinated by the inner life of this intimate place and am endlessly curious about how it worked. I always want to find out who was happy and who was not, how duty was balanced with self-interest, and how power worked across the generations.

It was via these paths that I eventually came to fix upon the grandest family of them all as a suitable subject for a book. I had always been interested in George III, that much-misunderstood man, in whom apparently contradictory characteristics were so often combined: good-natured but obstinate, kind but severe, humane but unforgiving, stolid but with the occasional ability to deliver an unexpectedly sharp and penetrating insight. At first, however, it was the story of his wife and daughters that most attracted me. Queen Charlotte’s reputation was, both in her own time and afterwards, equivocal at best. In her lifetime, she endured a very bad press, excoriated by her critics as a plain, bad-tempered harridan, miserly and avaricious, interested principally in the preservation of rigid court etiquette and the taking of copious amounts of snuff. The real story, as her letters and the diaries and correspondence of those around her reveal, was rather different. Charlotte was never easy to love or, in later life, to live with, but she had a great deal to bear. She was a very clever woman in an age that found clever woman unsettling. Her intellectual appetite was unequalled by any of her successors, but could never be expressed in a way that threatened established expectations about how queens were supposed to behave. She spent nearly twenty years of her life in a state of almost constant pregnancy. In public she embraced this as the destiny of a royal wife; but, as her private correspondence makes clear, she resented the decades spent in child-bearing. Before it was crushed by the horror of the king’s illness, from which she never really recovered, and the pressures of her public role, which she sometimes found almost impossible to endure, her personality was much more attractive, sprightly, humorous and playful.

The lives of her six daughters seemed to contemporaries to contain little of interest except for the occasional whiff of scandal. They lingered unmarried for so long that they were described even by their own niece as ‘a parcel of old maids’. Their narrative is perhaps more familiar now – they were the subject of a group biography by Flora Fraser in 2004 – and it is clear that beneath the apparently bland uneventfulness of their existence, the princesses too were subject to strong emotions which were often expressed in circumstances of great personal drama. Their lives were dominated by their struggles to balance what they saw as their duty to their parents with some degree of self-determination and freedom to make their own choices. Where did the obligations they owed to their mother and father end? When – if ever – might they be allowed to follow their own desire for love and happiness? These contests were largely fought out in the secluded privacy of home – ‘the nunnery’ as one of the princesses bitterly described it – which perhaps made the sisters’ trials less visible than those of their more flamboyant brothers, but they were no less the product of powerful and often disruptive feelings.

These were extraordinary stories in themselves, and ones I longed to tell. But the more I read, the more I was convinced that the experiences of the female royals could really be appreciated only as part of a much wider canvas. The experiences of Charlotte and indeed all her children – the sons as much as the daughters – could not be understood without exploring the personality, expectations and ambitions of the king. It was George III, both as father and monarch, who established the framework and set the emotional temperature for all the relationships within the royal family. And, as I soon discovered, his ideas about how he wanted his family to work, and what he thought could be achieved if his vision were to succeed, went far beyond the happiness he hoped it would bring to his private world.

George was unlike nearly all his Hanoverian predecessors in his desire for a quiet domestic life. As a young man, he yearned for his own version of the family life he thought so many of his subjects enjoyed: an emotionally fulfilling, mutually satisfying partnership between husband and wife, and respectful but affectionate relations with their children. This was an ideal that suited his dutiful, faithful character, and which he genuinely hoped would make him and his relatives happy. But he also hoped that by changing the way the royal family lived, by turning his back on the tradition of adultery, bad faith and rancour that he believed had marked the private lives of his predecessors, he could reform the very idea of kingship itself. The values he and his wife and children embraced in private would become those which defined the monarchy’s public role. Their good behaviour would give the institution meaning and purpose, connecting it with the hopes, aspirations and expectations of the people they ruled. The benefits he hoped he and his family would enjoy as individuals by living a happy, calm and rational family life would be mirrored by a similarly positive impact on the national imagination. In his thinking about his family, for the king, the personal was always inextricably linked to the political.

As I hope this book shows, there were many good things that emerged from George’s genuinely benign intentions. But, as will also be seen, his vision imposed on his family a host of new obligations and pressures. George, Charlotte and their children were the first generation of royals to be faced with the task of attempting to live a truly private life on the public stage, of reconciling the values of domesticity with the requirements of a crown. The book’s title, The Strangest Family, partly reflects the opinions of close observers and indeed of family members themselves that among the royals were to be found some very distinctive, strong-willed and colourful characters; but it also recognises the paradox at the heart of modern monarchy. For most people, the family represents the most intimate and personal of spheres. For royalty, it is also the defining aspect of their public identity. The modern idea of monarchy owes far more to George III and his conception of the royal role than is often realised. His insight did much to ensure the survival of the Crown, linking it to the hearts and minds of the British in ways of which he would surely have approved. But, in other respects, his descendants still find themselves trying to square the circle he created, attempting to enjoy a family life defined by private virtues, yet obliged to do so in the unflinching glare of public scrutiny.

Although the experiences of George, Charlotte and their children are at the heart of this book, I have ranged beyond their stories to include those of their immediate forebears. It is impossible to appreciate what George III was attempting to achieve without understanding the moral world he sought so decisively to reject. In doing so, I was fascinated by the complicated marriage of George II and his wife Caroline (another clever Hanoverian queen), a stormy relationship coloured by passion, jealousy and deceit in fairly equal measure. Their hatred for their eldest son Frederick, operatic in its intensity, still makes shocking reading after so many years. I have also looked forward in time to include in some detail the story of George III’s only legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte. Hers is a sensibility very different from that of her predecessors: she was a young woman of romantic inclination, devoted to the works of Lord Byron and given to flirtations with unsuitable officers. The clash of wills between the young Charlotte and her grandmother, the queen, is one in which two very different interpretations of royal, and indeed female, duty collide, with an outcome as unexpected as it is touching.

I did not set out to write a book that ranged so far across the generations and included so many large and powerful personalities. I believe, however, that without that level of scale and ambition, it would be impossible to do justice to the story I wanted to tell. Besides, I have always loved a family saga. That is the narrative that dominates the diaries and correspondence that have been my window onto the reality of eighteenth-century lives. I have tried to use those sources to let the characters in this book speak, as far as possible, for themselves. I like it best when their voices are heard as clearly and as directly as possible. It will be up to the reader to decide if I have succeeded.

Bath, July 2014

Epigraphs

‘But it is a very strange family, at least the children – sons and daughters’

SYLVESTER DOUGLAS, Lord Glenbervie, diarist

‘No family was ever composed of such odd people, I believe, as they all draw different ways, and there have happened such extraordinary things, that in any other family, public or private, are never heard of before’

PRINCESS CHARLOTTE, daughter of George IV

‘Laughing, [she] added that she knew but one family that was more odd, and she would not name that family for the world’

PRINCESS AUGUSTA, mother of George III

Prologue

FORTY-FOUR YEARS AFTER THE EVENT took place that altered his life for ever, George III could still recall with forensic clarity exactly how it happened. On Saturday 25 October 1760, he had set off from his house in Kew to travel to London. He had not gone far when he was stopped by a man he did not recognise, who pulled a note out of his pocket and handed it to him. It was, George remembered, ‘a piece of coarse, white-brown paper, with the name Schroeder written on it, and nothing more’. He knew instantly what this terse and grubby communication signified. It was sent by a German servant of his elderly grandfather, George II; using ‘a private mark agreed between them’, it informed the young man that the old king was dying, and that he should prepare to inherit the crown.1

To avoid raising alarm, George warned his entourage to say nothing about what had passed, and began to gallop back to Kew. Before he reached home, a second messenger approached him, bearing a letter from his aunt Amelia, the old king’s spinster daughter. With blunt punctiliousness, she had addressed it ‘To His Majesty’; George did not need to open it to understand that his grandfather was dead and that he had come into his inheritance. Amelia was probably the first person to call him by the title he would now bear for the rest of his life. With a similarly precise observation of the formalities, he signed his reply to her ‘GR’ – Georgius Rex. When he had set out for London that morning, he was the Prince of Wales, a young man of twenty-two embarking on a day of ordinary business, with no reason to suppose the life of perpetual anticipation and apprehension which he had endured since childhood was about to come to an end. The message contained in that ‘coarse, white-brown paper’ changed all that, turning him into the ruler of one of the most powerful nations in the world. ‘A most extraordinary thing is just happened to me,’ he scribbled breathlessly in a letter he wrote immediately after receiving the news.2 He was right. His long apprenticeship was over. He was king at last, and the mission for which he had been preparing himself for so many years could now begin in earnest.

*

The prospects for the new reign looked exceptionally bright. ‘No British monarch,’ the diarist Horace Walpole later declared, ‘has ascended the throne with so many advantages as George III.’3 The new king was very fortunate in his timing. Had his predecessor died just a few years earlier, Walpole’s bullish optimism would have been inconceivable. Since the mid-1750s, Britain had been embroiled in a territorial struggle between the monarchies of Europe which, by 1756, had metamorphosed into a conflict of international proportions. During the Seven Years War, in North America, the Caribbean and India, the British fought the French in a clash of would-be global superpowers to establish strategic mastery over whole continents. Things started badly for the British, but with the appointment of the buccaneering William Pitt as first (later known as ‘prime’) minister in 1757, the tide was decisively turned. In the course of a year, the French surrendered valuable sugar-producing islands in the West Indies, lost the Battle of Quebec, which challenged their cherished pre-eminence in Canada, and saw their fleet decisively beaten by the Royal Navy at Quiberon Bay. It was hardly surprising that 1759 became known as ‘the year of victories’. As news of fresh triumphs continued to roll in, even the British themselves seemed somewhat taken aback by the scale and speed of their achievement. When the French capitulated at Pondicherry in 1761, which effectively forced them out of India, Walpole was not sure he could absorb any more success. ‘I don’t know how the Romans did, but I cannot support two victories every week.’4

Britain’s confidence on the international stage was mirrored by a similarly robust sense of self-worth at home. César de Saussure, a Swiss traveller who visited Britain in 1727, was struck even then by the unshakeable sense of pride the British displayed in themselves and all their works: ‘I do not think that there is a people more prejudiced in its own favour than the British people. They look upon foreigners in general with contempt and think nothing is done as well elsewhere as it is in their own country.’5 The British had no difficulty in identifying the source of their good fortune: their political liberty, guaranteed to them by birthright and history, and enshrined in a constitutional settlement which protected them equally from the despotism of absolutist kings and the anarchy of the mob. De Saussure observed that the English ‘value this gift more than all the joys of life, and would sacrifice everything to retain it’. Nor was this passionate attachment confined to the political classes. Even the poor, who could not vote, ‘will give you to understand that there is no country in the world where such perfect freedom may be enjoyed as in England’.6

Liberty was not an unmixed blessing, however. Whilst foreign visitors found much to admire in the constitutional freedoms the British enjoyed, they were far more ambivalent when confronted with the impact of these ideas on the mass of the population. The assertive, aggressive, unapologetic behaviour of the urban poor, particularly in London, shocked observers used to more decorous (or more cowed) communities. De Saussure thought ordinary Londoners disrespectful, rowdy and threatening, ‘of a very brutal and insolent nature, and very quarrelsome’. He was horrified by their habitual drunkenness and casual violence, but was most disturbed by their lack of respect for their social superiors. He noted – perhaps as a result of painful personal experience – that a finely dressed man, especially one ‘with a plume in his hat or his hair tied in a bow’, risked verbal abuse and worse if he walked alone through the poorer streets. On holidays such as Lord Mayor’s Day, ‘He is sure, not only of being jeered at and being be-spattered with mud, but, as likely as not, dead dogs and cats will be thrown at him, for the mob makes a provision beforehand of these playthings, so that they may amuse themselves with them on the great day.’7

The energetically expressed opinions of the crowd frequently went far beyond contempt for the sartorial pretensions of the rich. Mobilised in large numbers, the freeborn Englishman was given to demonstrations of popular feeling that were often violent. Issues of political and religious controversy (particularly those which were thought to undermine the dual foundations of British freedom – the Protestant settlement and a limited monarchy) brought men and women on to the streets to make their views loudly known. Throughout the eighteenth century, the threat of disorder and disturbance was as much a part of the life of British politics as the parliamentary vote. As they went about the process of government, the great and the good were abused, threatened and sometimes physically manhandled; parades were staged, effigies burnt, stones thrown, windows broken, carriages overturned, property destroyed; there were injuries and sometimes deaths. The practice of liberty could be a rough business on the streets of George III’s Britain.

If Britain in 1760, was a volatile and sometimes intimidating place, it was also an increasingly wealthy one. Almost every visitor commented on the general air of comfortable prosperity that manifested itself in the clean and well-appointed private houses, the luxurious inns and, above all, in the quality of the roads. Unlike most European highways, these were well engineered and very extensive, linking not just the great cities, but smaller market towns and villages. They were paid for by tolls, and regularly maintained. Foreigners were amazed to discover that travel, such an ordeal everywhere else, had in large areas of England become a leisurely communal pleasure. One bemused observer noted that even on a Sunday evening, the roads outside London were packed with people on the move, visiting, travelling, or simply taking the air. ‘Carriages of every kind … succeeded each other without interruption and with such rapidity that the whole picture looked like magic; it certainly showed a degree of wealth and extent of population, of which one had no notion in France.’8

From the moment of their arrival, travellers to Britain were struck by the sheer busyness of the place. They were astonished by the air of perpetual activity, not just on the roads, but in the teeming streets; in the ports dominated by the masts of tightly packed ships; on the new canal systems, thronged with burdened barges; in the parks and pleasure gardens, where rich and poor mingled in huge numbers in pursuit of a good time. In fact, mid-eighteenth-century Britain had yet to experience the rapid growth in population that would see its towns and cities grow to unprecedented size in the next hundred years. There were around 7.5 million people living in England, Scotland and Wales in 1750. France, a much larger country, supported far greater numbers; in the same year, its population reached 25 million. The universal impression of Britain as a crowded, bustling community arose less from the absolute numbers of its inhabitants than from a far more significant development – the extraordinary size and influence of its capital city.

Although Britain was not yet a heavily populated country, it was already a strongly metropolitan one. London doubled in size between 1600 and 1800; by the end of the seventeenth century, it was the largest city in western Europe. By 1750, only 2.5 per cent of Frenchmen lived in Paris; in comparison, London housed 11 per cent of the population.9 An unprecedented proportion of Britons were Londoners, whether by birth or immigration. Still more had some experience of metropolitan life, even if they subsequently left it behind them. It has been calculated that one in six of the population of mid-eighteenth-century Britain had lived in London at some stage in their lives.10 The magnetic attraction of the capital was overwhelming, especially to foreign visitors. Most travellers went straight there, and few ventured beyond the southern counties which were already becoming the capital’s dependent hinterlands. Their experiences were dominated by the time they spent in the capital, which shaped profoundly their perceptions of the country as a whole.

The lure of London was not confined to foreigners. Like so many other ambitious young men of the time, James Boswell was convinced that the only proper existence for an eager striver like himself was one lived to the full in London. He could not wait to leave his native Edinburgh behind and embrace all the possibilities London offered. Arriving at its outskirts in 1762, he was beside himself with anticipation, declaring that ‘I was all life and joy!’ As his carriage descended Highgate Hill, ‘I gave three huzzas and we went briskly in.’11 It was Boswell’s great patron Samuel Johnson – himself a grateful emigrant from the staid Midlands – who famously linked the appetite for London’s pleasures to the enjoyment of life itself. From his first arrival in town, Boswell did all he could to demonstrate the truth of Johnson’s observation. Subject headings from the index to the London Journal that Boswell wrote during his stay between November 1762 and August 1763 give a taste of the capital’s gamey appeal: ‘Artists exhibitions, billiards, bleeding, Bow St magistrates court, card-playing, catch singing, circulating library, cock-fighting, concert, damning a play, Guards on parade, horseback rides, intrigues, Newgate prison, prostitution, royal menagerie, Mrs Salmon’s waxworks, surgeons and their fees, Tyburn, execution at, watermen rowing for prizes.’12

London’s reputation as the place where anything was on offer and where everything seemed achievable was then, as it is now, the key to much of its pungent attraction. But it promised far more than entertaining diversions. The growth of the capital was driven by the extraordinary number of roles it performed. It was the focus of the nation’s politics. The king lived there, it was where Parliament assembled, and it was there that the political classes expected to fight their battles and win their arguments. At court at St James’s, in the government offices at Whitehall, the debating chambers at Westminster, they planned their strategies and marshalled their supporters; in the conversations of the coffee houses and taverns, in the great mansions of aristocratic grandees and sometimes on the volatile, riotous streets, the successes and failures of their policies were forcibly and mercilessly assessed. London was also a magnet for anyone interested in the making and management of that other great lever of power: money. The capital was home to Europe’s most sophisticated banking system, and to the busiest, most innovative and ambitious financial markets in the world. The wealthy moneymen of the City of London – known derisively as ‘Cits’, whose nouveau-riche antics were ruthlessly caricatured by contemporary satirists – had long overtaken the Dutch as the brokers, bankers and insurers of international choice. But London’s commerce went far beyond the buying and selling of money. It was a thriving market place for the selling of goods as well as services. It was a great port, a major destination for shipping, whose crowded forests of masts packed into the Thames docks astonished foreign visitors and were a striking visual reminder of the other great preoccupation of eighteenth-century Britons: trade.

The whole of Europe benefited from an upturn in international trade in the middle years of the eighteenth century, but no nation did so with such spectacular results as Britain. British merchants dealt in a vast and ever-expanding range of goods. New essentials – such as tea, coffee and sugar – came into the country, whilst a host of exports – from textiles to metalwares to Josiah Wedgwood’s competitively priced china – flowed out.

Other British entrepreneurs undertook a darker business. Slavery was ‘one of the staple trades of Englishmen’, and the great ports of Bristol and Liverpool were largely built on its tainted dividends.13 The huge returns generated by such ventures, whether trading in people or in things, ramped up confidence, creating a perfect storm of enthusiasm for the very idea of commerce itself. ‘There never was,’ observed Samuel Johnson, ‘from earliest ages, a time in which trade so much engaged the attention of mankind, or commercial gain was sought after with such general emulation.’14 In Britain this was experienced with particular intensity; the nation’s sense of itself as a great trading nation was, in the mid-eighteenth century, firmly and irrevocably embedded in its identity as a free and enterprising people. Part of the appeal was a simple one: trade made a great number of investors a great deal of money, but it played a role in the construction of an idea of Britishness that went far beyond the advantage of individual profit. The fruits of commercial enterprise were widely believed to underwrite all the constitutional advantages which made Britain so specially favoured among nations. The private wealth it generated, which could not be taken away by taxation unless approved by Parliament, acted as a bulwark against the ambitions of despotic power at home. A poor and hungry people was not a free people, and was easily corrupted by the bribes or threats of overmighty rulers. The profits of trade paid for a strong navy, which kept the seas safe for British exports abroad, but, unlike a standing army, could never be used to threaten the integrity of domestic politics. It delivered a prosperity which, as early economists already understood, kept the wheels and ploughs of industry turning. There was no aspect of the distinctive British way of life which it did not touch. It was little wonder that at every convivial supper or political gathering of the period, once a toast had been drunk to the king, it was the invocation ‘To trade’s increase!’ that was greeted with the most heartfelt and passionate sense of shared feeling.

The wealth produced from the profits of trade was to be seen in all the great commercial centres of Britain – Liverpool, Bristol and Glasgow – which expanded rapidly in the 1760s and beyond. The influence of new money was also evident in the development of pleasure resorts such as Bath and Cheltenham, towns which existed largely as a way to spend profits made elsewhere. Then as now, it was through property – the building, designing and furnishing of houses – that individual prosperity found its most visible expression. These were the years in which the urban centres of Britain were rebuilt and re-imagined as the rich, the genteel and the polite moved surely and steadily out of the old city quarters, leaving behind their uncomfortable proximity with dirty trades and the insolent poor, constructing for themselves new houses built in terraces and squares, on clean, classical lines, punctuated by parks and gardens. Across the monied hotspots of Britain, the process was endlessly and elegantly replicated, from Edinburgh to Dublin to Newcastle, creating a vision of town life whose ordered, light and spacious appeal endures to this day.

The changes to the landscape of mid-eighteenth-century life were not confined to the cities. There was as yet little obvious sign of the revolution in industrial production that would transform Britain out of all recognition during George III’s long reign. In the valleys of Coalbrookdale and the iron foundries of Wales, in the workshops of the Midlands and the mills of Lancashire, new technologies were being developed – engines, looms and furnaces – which would recast the relationship between humanity and the natural world, ushering in production on a hitherto unimaginable scale; but it would be at least another twenty years before these became the dominant and visible signature of British economic expansion.

But for most contemporaries, it was the farm, not the factory, which, after trade, was seen as the most forceful engine of change. For over a generation, it had been improvements in agriculture which had underpinned prosperity. The green, rural countryside that forms such an elegiac backdrop to so much Georgian art was in fact one of the most intensively managed landscapes in Europe. The application of scientific methods to farming – especially new fertilisation techniques which overcame the need to let fields lie fallow for years at a time – transformed crop yields and increased profits, providing a tempting incentive to consolidate smaller holdings into larger and more efficient businesses. For some, the result of these changes was impoverishment: families who had once owned small plots of land were forced off them and into the day labour market, subject to the fluctuating needs of the season and the whims of the farmer’s overseer. For others, the result was cheaper food and much more of it. This left them with more disposable income to spend; for perhaps the first time in history, significant numbers of ordinary people had money to buy goods beyond the basic necessities of life. Their purchases in turn put more money into the hands of those who made the things they bought, and the outcome was a steady but significant increase in both the wealth and buying power of ‘the poor and middling sorts’.

This steady diffusion of prosperity was obvious to anyone visiting Britain. Every observer noted that there was clearly a good deal of new money around. Among the very rich, it was apparent in the construction of great new country houses, and in the seemingly limitless demand for luxurious objects to put in them: clocks and carpets, portraits and brocades, china and silverware, chairs, tables and sideboards. What struck foreign visitors most powerfully, however, was the degree to which the middle classes, and even some of the poor, shared in the general sense of improved wellbeing. In the opinion of one German writer in the 1770s, the ‘luxury’ enjoyed by the middle and lower classes ‘had risen to such a pitch as never before seen in the world’.15 A few years later, a Russian traveller compared the general wellbeing he saw in London with the gulf between rich and poor he had witnessed in France. ‘How different this is from Paris! There vastness and filth, here simplicity and astonishing cleanliness; there wealth and poverty in continual contrast, here a general air of sufficiency; there palaces out of which crawls poverty, here tiny brick cottages with an air of dignity and tranquillity, lord and artisan almost indistinguishable in their immaculate dress.’16

As he went on to remind his readers, squalor and poverty were of course still to be found in eighteenth-century England, but most foreign observers agreed that a larger proportion of the British now seemed to have escaped the worst deprivations that were the general experience of the European poor. Back in the 1720s, de Saussure had observed with surprise that ‘the lower classes are usually well dressed, wearing good cloth and linen. You never see wooden shoes in England, and the poorest individuals never go with naked feet.’17 Indeed, in England, the wearing of ‘wooden shoes’ was indelibly associated with the desperate poverty held to be the inevitable product of life under Catholic absolute monarchies. The passionate cry of: ‘No popery and no wooden shoes!’, which so often resounded through the streets of eighteenth-century London, was an expression of the conviction held by even the poorest Britons that they enjoyed a standard of living of which their foreign counterparts could only dream.

The small prosperity of small people created the demand for ever larger numbers of affordable goods. British manufacturers soon showed themselves eager and adaptable enough to supply them. Unlike many of its grander European competitors, the British market did not just cater to the super-rich – to ‘the magnificence of princes’. It was just as interested in selling to new customers, less wealthy but more numerous. Matthew Boulton, the great Birmingham-based producer of the buckles and buttons that were an essential part of every eighteenth-century wardrobe, had no doubt which of the two kinds of buyer he valued most. ‘We think it of far more consequence to supply the People than the Nobility only … We think that they will do more towards supporting a great Manufactory than all the Lords of The Nation.’18 Boulton understood that an entire new market had emerged, a new generation of purchasers, looking to achieve their own moderately priced vision of the good life, and he and others were ready and willing to supply it. ‘Thus it is,’ wrote the clergyman and economist Josiah Tucker, ‘that the English … have better conveniences in their houses and affect to have far more in quantity of clean, neat furniture and a greater variety, such as carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc., (things hardly known abroad amongst persons of such rank) than are to be found in any country in Europe.’19 These simple and often extraordinarily resilient objects, designed to appeal to the taste of modest eighteenth-century buyers, were made in such numbers that any frequenter of modern auction rooms or antique shops will be familiar with them. Those that have survived the uses and abuses of 250 years are often beautiful to look at and still desirable things to own. They are also mute witness to the power of a quiet revolution which began to transform British experience just as George III began his reign. He was the first king to rule over a nation of consumers.

The Britain in which the young king acceded in 1760 was an assertive and forceful society, sometimes brash and overbearing in the robustness of its self-belief. It was not an easy place in which to be poor, vulnerable, sensitive or a failure; but for those who could stand the pace, and who were not among the losers crushed by the relentlessness of its forward movement, the experience of being British in the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by a sense of energetic exhilaration, an acute consciousness of an upward trajectory towards levels of international power and domestic wealth that were unthinkable only a generation before. The experience of the nation thus mirrored that of its inhabitants; both now found themselves in possession of assets that had arrived with swift and surprising speed. Horace Walpole caught the mood perfectly. ‘You would not know your country again,’ he wrote to a friend who had long lived abroad. ‘You left it as a private island living upon its means. You would find it now capital of the world.’20

*

In such circumstances, the accession of a youthful king, whose vitality seemed to reflect the ambition of the country he ruled, was greeted with unconstrained enthusiasm. George II had been on the throne since 1727. He was an old man, aged seventy-six at the time of his death, who belonged to the old world. Of the new monarch, Philip, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, usually the most detached and cynical of observers, wrote that he was the king of ‘his united and unanimous people, and enjoys their confidence and love to such a degree that were I not as fully convinced as I am of His Majesty’s heart and the moderation of his will, I should tremble for the liberties of my country’.21

Impressions of the young man at the centre of this whirlwind of attention were universally positive, contrasting his affability with the curmudgeonly attitudes of his elderly predecessor. Walpole, who rushed to court to get an early look at his new ruler, was pleased with what he found: ‘This sovereign don’t stand in one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground and dropping bits of German news; he walks about and speaks to everybody.’22

The polite and considerate monarch had not yet grown into the bulky figure he would become in early middle age, the familiar image of florid imperturbability whose prominent blue eyes gaze so resolutely from later portraits. Although he was not conventionally handsome, the Duchess of Northumberland, who knew him well, described him tactfully as ‘tall and robust, more graceful than genteel’. The family tendency towards fat, against which George struggled diligently throughout his life, meant that he would never look the part of either romantic hero or fashion plate. He had strong, white teeth, evidently enough of a rarity, even in aristocratic circles, to merit approving comment by a number of observers. His hair, when neither powdered nor hidden beneath a wig, was considered one of his best points. It was, the duchess recorded, ‘a light auburn, which grew very handsomely to his face’. She also admired his clear and healthy complexion, but noted that in common with others of his age, ‘he had now and then a few pimples out’. For the duchess, however, it was George’s demeanour that mattered more. ‘There was a noble openness in his countenance, blended with a cheerful good-natured affability,’ which trumped his prosaic appearance and even gave him a certain fugitive charm.23 The portrait that best captures the elusive quality of George’s appeal was made a few years before his accession by the Swiss painter Jean-Etienne Liotard. Delicately rendered in pastels, it does not flatter – the man George would later become is visible in the round lineaments of his face, the fullness of his mouth and the protuberance of his eyes – but it captures brilliantly the clear-eyed, healthy, pink-and-white freshness of his youthful self.

George’s looks were only part of the story. In the opening weeks of his reign, admiration for the new king’s ‘open and honest countenance’ was exceeded only by approval of the unstudied excellence of his behaviour. Everyone who saw him in the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death commented on the considerate correctness of all his actions. ‘He has behaved with the greatest propriety, dignity and decency,’ observed Walpole.24 He knew how to carry himself respectfully at solemn moments, but onlookers were also struck by his ability to strike a lighter note. His unforced, natural warmth of character was particularly admired. Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, who saw him often at court, approvingly observed in him ‘a look of happiness and good humour that pleases everyone – and me in particular’.25

The grace and cheerfulness that George displayed in these days of excitement and promise were more than the temporary product of a moment; he was an essentially good-hearted man, who tried to observe the decencies of gentlemanly behaviour even in the darkest and most trying times of his reign. However, the polite, easy candour celebrated by so many observers in those early days was only part of who he really was. There was a sombre, more thoughtful cast to his character, which Liotard’s portrait caught as acutely as it did the new-minted freshness of his features. The young George stares watchfully out from the canvas, with an air of wary self-containment. This is a serious man, with a serious purpose in mind – there is no hint of frivolity or light-heartedness in his measured expression. For all its tenderness, it is also an image of quiet, sustained – even steely – determination; and it was a better indicator of what lay in George’s mind as he contemplated the future than all the benign gestures with which he navigated the immediate aftermath of his grandfather’s death. For George III came to the throne determined to do more than merely replace George II. He aspired to be not just the next king, but a new kind of king.

As heir to the crown, George had spent much of his youth transfixed by the inevitability of his destiny, trying to comprehend what was expected of him. What was the true purpose of kingship in the modern world? Why had he been called upon to undertake this extraordinary and unasked-for burden? How could he discharge it as providence intended, fulfilling his duty to God, to himself and to his subjects? The answers to these questions, he eventually concluded, encompassed far more than the narrowly political concerns that had absorbed the energies of his predecessors. Their obsession with the day-to-day management of political business, the ups and downs and ins and outs of ministerial fortunes, had obscured the unique and singular meaning of sovereignty. The job of a king, George had decided, was no less than to graft moral purpose on to the nation’s polity. It was his role to act as the conscience of the country, and the guardian of its true interests. He was, George believed, the active agent of principle in public life, a figure intimately connected with the daily workings of politics and yet with a significance far beyond them. It was his duty to remind politicians what the point of politics was and, through his interventions and understanding, to direct them beyond their personal and party interests towards a larger and more lasting common good.

This interpretation of his task did more than influence George’s public life; it also profoundly shaped his sense of his duties as a private man. How could a king act as a moral compass to others if he did not live a moral life himself? George’s idea of kingship thus reached far beyond a purely public dimension; it contained within itself a powerful personal imperative too. There was a direct connection between his actions in the political world and his conduct at home. He could not act as a force for good in the national interest if he was unable to live by right principles in his private life.

George’s desire to see these ideas reflected in his actions as king was to put a great deal of pressure on the established order of politics in the years immediately after his accession; but it was their impact on the intimate world of the royal family that would prove far more revolutionary and of much greater lasting significance. He knew that to deliver the moral authority he needed to justify his vision, he would need to create a new kind of family life for himself. This meant redefining the personal relationships at its heart, reshaping what it meant to be a royal husband, wife, son or daughter. This would involve a greater emphasis on meeting high moral standards, a greater stress on duty, obligation and conscience. But he would also attempt to introduce into these roles something of the human warmth and emotional authenticity he believed non-royals found in them, hoping to provide for his wife and his children the solace and affection that seemed so singularly lacking in the lives of his immediate predecessors.

Because in becoming a new kind of king, George recognised that he would also have to become a new kind of Hanoverian. He understood that his idea of kingship required him to turn his back on his family’s past, rejecting a malign inheritance of emotional dysfunction that had been handed down from generation to generation. Both his great-grandfather, George I, and grandfather, George II, had hated their sons with a passion bordering on madness. None of his male relations had been faithful to his wife. Every Hanoverian prince kept a succession of mistresses with scant concern for the feelings of his spouse, who responded with either mute resignation or loud and furious cries of dismay. The children of these unhappy unions were, unsurprisingly, rarely happy themselves. Drawn into feuds between their parents, they were angry, jealous and disaffected. They schemed and quarrelled between themselves and seemed destined to repeat the behaviour that had destroyed any chance of contentment for their parents. As George saw it, this legacy of amoral, cynical behaviour had warped and corrupted the Hanoverians, crippling their effectiveness as rulers and making their private lives miserable. It had made them bad kings and bad people. It had set husband against wife, father against son, sister against brother. It had thwarted their ambitions and corrupted their affections, leaving in its wake nothing but bitterness.

George planned to put an end to the whole painful cycle. On the very day he became king, he sent for his uncle, William, Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden, with whom he had had many differences in the past, and announced his intention to outlaw the old habits of spite and bad faith. Walpole heard that George had been most explicit in signalling the magnitude of the change, telling the duke that ‘it had not been common in their family to live well together, but that he was determined to live well with all his family’.26 It was such a public declaration that everyone appreciated its significance.

George’s intention to reform the way his family related to one another underpinned all the decisions he made about his private life in the years that followed. It dictated his choice of a wife, and shaped the ambitions he had for their relationship within marriage. It influenced his attitude to fatherhood, and was the foundation upon which he based the upbringing of his small children. It governed the way the young princes and princesses were educated and laid down a pattern of behaviour they were expected to follow as adults. Alongside his profound Christian faith – another distinction that marked him out from his forebears – it informed almost every action he took in relation to his intimate, personal world.

At one level, his devotion to the project grew out of something deeper than conscious strategy; it was a manifestation of the most enduring aspects of his personality, a reflection of the qualities of exacting, dutiful conscientiousness that were indivisible from his character. George acted as he did because he was who he was. But his desire for change owed as much to his sense of history as to the promptings of his nature. He was profoundly aware of his family’s failings and believed passionately that it was his duty to reject the pattern of behaviour they had bequeathed to him. For that reason, the lives of George’s predecessors are worth exploring, in all their dissolute, chaotic extraordinariness. They were the mirror image of everything George thought valuable and true in human relationships – a dark vision of just how wrong things could go when all sense of discipline, restraint and honest affection was lost. To appreciate what motivated the most upright of the Hanoverians, it is necessary to understand something of the people against whom he so firmly defined himself.

CHAPTER 1
The Strangest Family

GEORGE III’S FIRST SPEECH FROM the throne was a resounding declaration of his particular fitness to take up the task before him. ‘Born and educated in this country,’ he pronounced, ‘I glory in the name of Britain.’1 It was not a statement any of his immediate predecessors could have made, which was of course precisely why he said it. From the very earliest days of his reign, he sought to mark himself out from his Hanoverian forebears. Neither George I nor George II had been born in Britain, and neither ever thought of the country as home. Their true Heimat was Hanover, a princely state in northern Germany in whose flat farmlands the dynasty had its ancestral roots. They both thought of themselves first and foremost as electors of Hanover; their kingship of England, Scotland and Ireland came very much second in their hearts.

When George III became monarch, the family had been somewhat reluctantly seated on the throne for only forty-six years. The crown of Great Britain had not been a prize they had expected to inherit, but they had done so with the death of Queen Anne in 1714. Anne was the daughter of James II, the last Stuart king, who was forced off his throne in 1688 when his Catholicism became unacceptable to the Protestant English. In the Glorious Revolution that followed, the Dutch prince William of Orange, nephew and son-in-law of the deposed James, was invited to become king, with the stipulation that henceforth, only a Protestant could become sovereign, a qualification still in force today. Anne, who succeeded the childless William, was known with cruel irony as ‘the teeming Princess of Denmark’. Her pregnancies were many, but, despite an appalling catalogue of gynaecological endurance, she had no living children to show for it; she lost five babies in infancy and suffered thirteen miscarriages. When her only surviving child, the eleven-year-old Duke of Gloucester, died in 1700, it was clear that an heir must be looked for elsewhere.

The defenders of the Glorious Revolution did not find it easy to identify a suitably qualified candidate. Catholicism ruled out James II’s exiled son, who had otherwise by far the strongest claim, as well as fifty-six other religiously unacceptable potential heirs. Eventually, it was decided to offer the crown to Electress Sophia of Hanover. A daughter of Charles I’s sister Elizabeth, in purely dynastic terms her claim was weaker than those of many more directly related contenders, but her impeccable Protestant credentials won the day, and it was her name and that of her descendants which was enshrined in the Act of Settlement of 1701 as heirs to the crown if Queen Anne should die without a child. When Anne’s health, exhausted by a lifetime of fruitless childbearing, fatally gave out in 1714, the electress was already dead, so the succession passed to her eldest son, George Louis. He was crowned in London later that year as George I.

It was not an entirely popular choice. The Jacobites – supporters of the old Stuart monarchy – rioted in at least twenty English towns. It was worse in Scotland, still smarting with outraged national grievance at the Act of Union, which linked the nations together in 1707, and whose simmering discontents erupted into the uprisings of 1715 and 1745. Although on those occasions it looked as if Hanoverians might be forced back to the electorate that was always their first love, they hung on, somewhat despite themselves, and it was their dynasty that ruled Britain until the death of George III’s son, William IV, in 1837.

As a child, the diarist Horace Walpole, who wrote so voluminously about George I’s successors, had a brief encounter with the first of the Hanoverians. His father, Sir Robert Walpole, was George’s first minister, and as such was able to gratify for his son ‘the first vehement inclination that I ever expressed … to see the king’. He was taken in the evening to St James’s Palace and, after supper, informally introduced to the monarch. The ten-year-old Horace ‘knelt down and kissed his hand, he said a few words to me, and my conductress led me back to my mother’. Writing nearly seventy years later, Walpole recalled that ‘the person of the king is as perfect in my memory, as if I saw him but yesterday. It was that of an elderly man, rather pale and exactly like his pictures and coins; tall; of an aspect rather good than august; and with a dark tie wig, a plain coat, waistcoat and breeches of a snuff-coloured cloth, with stockings of the same colour, and a blue riband all over.’ He had, he thought in retrospect, been remarkably indulged, for the king ‘took me up in his arms, kissed me and chatted some time’.2

Walpole, who in later life liked to think of himself as almost a republican, and who observed that he had ‘never since felt any enthusiasm for royal persons’, was clearly captivated. But there was another side to the king who seemed so kind and genial to the starstruck small boy. For it was George I who must bear much of the responsibility for nurturing the tradition of Hanoverian family hatred that was to bequeath such a miserable inheritance to future generations.

*

George I’s own experience of family life was hardly a happy one. His father, Ernst August, was a man of calculating ambition, dominated by the all-pervasive desire to see his dukedom of Hanover elevated to the far greater status of an electorate. His many children were raised in an atmosphere of military discipline, expected to display absolute obedience to his will and utter devotion to the grand project of dynastic consolidation. He seldom saw any of them alone or in informal circumstances; unsurprisingly, they were said to be ‘solemn and restrained’ in his presence.3 Ernst’s wife Sophia, whose antecedents were ultimately to bring the crown of Great Britain into the family’s possession, was a far more relaxed and sympathetic character than her unbending husband – Walpole described her as ‘a woman of parts and great vivacity’ – but she too submitted without question to her husband’s severe dictatorship.4 Any resistance on her part had been undone by love. She had expected very little from her arranged marriage, and when, against all her expectations, Ernst proved a passionate and enthusiastic lover, Sophia could not believe her luck. From her wedding night onwards, for the rest of her life, she was completely in thrall to her husband’s judgement, never venturing to set her own considerable intellect against any of his schemes. Ernst’s numerous affairs with other women caused her much pain – in middle age, she wrote sadly that she could not believe she had ever been so foolish as to imagine he would remain faithful to her for ever – yet she fought hard to preserve her primacy in his eyes. She was much tried by his long relationship with the malicious Countess von Platen, who subjected her over many years to a litany of carefully calculated public insults; but Sophia’s commitment to the errant Ernst August never wavered. She once declared that she would ‘gladly have followed him to the Antipodes’.5

Sophia’s dogged devotion won her no part at all in her husband’s political strategising. He acknowledged the sharpness of her mind but denied her any active role in his schemes. She was ‘without influence’ in family affairs and allowed no say in the making of even the most significant decisions. When Ernst decided to disinherit his many younger sons in order to consolidate all the family possessions in the hands of George, the eldest, Sophia could do nothing to protect their interests. Angry and betrayed, three of the brothers left Ernst’s court and signed on as soldiers in the Imperial service. Within a few years, all had died in battle, to the despairing grief of their mother. She was equally powerless when Ernst began to make marriage plans for the favoured George. Ernst had long before decided that his eldest son would marry his cousin, Sophia Dorothea of Celle, thus uniting two branches of the family dukedoms into a single greater state.

For all its desirability as a political alliance, it was obvious to anyone who knew them that George and Sophia Dorothea were hardly well matched. Sophia Dorothea, who was only eleven when the marriage was first proposed, had been brought up from her earliest days in a relaxed atmosphere of indulgence and luxury. Her father, a very different man from his single-minded brother Ernst, had married for love a woman considered beneath him in the complicated gradations of princely hierarchy, and had sacrificed the opportunity for further aggrandisement as a result. Sophia Dorothea, the only child of this love match, grew up into a beautiful woman – sophisticated, conscious of her attractiveness, and considered very French in her tastes. She loved to be amused and entertained, and was said to be obsessed by fashion. Lively and good-looking, she had no shortage of suitors. Her prospective mother-in-law regarded her balefully; she was sure she would not find a soulmate in her reserved and cautious eldest son.

Sophia, who described herself as ‘a nearly stupidly fond mother’, was devoted to the silent and watchful George.6 She admired her son’s deep sense of responsibility and his formidable devotion to duty. Others found him harder to appreciate. His cousin, the Duchess of Orléans, thought him ‘ordinarily neither cheerful nor friendly, dry and crabbed’. She complained that ‘his words have to be squeezed out of him’, that he was suspicious, proud, parsimonious and had ‘no natural good-heartedness’.7 Sophia maintained that those who thought her son sullen simply did not understand him; they did not see that, beneath his undemonstrative surface, he took things much to heart, and was far more sensitive than he was prepared to show. But she knew him well enough to suspect that he was not the best partner for the outgoing Sophia Dorothea, who loved playful conversation, sought out cheerful company and had a taste for extravagant entertainments. The prospective bride’s mother had similar misgivings; but neither could persuade their respective husbands to take their concerns seriously.

George himself had little to say on the subject. It was widely supposed that he would have been happy to be left alone with his mistress, a sister of the Countess von Platen, who had – as it were – continued the family business, becoming the son’s lover, as her sister was the father’s. However, obedience, not self-fulfilment, came first in the young George’s mind. He had seen Sophia Dorothea, and had apparently been impressed by her good looks; but there is little doubt that he would have taken her anyway, regardless of any personal qualities, once his father had wished it. His mother once remarked that ‘George would marry a cripple if he could serve the House of Brunswick’.8 In 1682, the ill-matched couple did the bidding of their fathers, and were married. Sophia Dorothea was sixteen, her groom five years older.

At first they seem to have made the best of things, and in 1683 Sophia Dorothea gave birth to a son, George August. Such speedy provision of a healthy male heir raised her immeasurably in Ernst’s eyes, and for a few years Sophia Dorothea’s life was probably not unpleasant. Under the eye of her satisfied father-in-law, she enjoyed court life at the elaborate palace of Herrenhausen, relishing the parties, masques and concerts Ernst August laid on there to magnify his grandeur. She saw very little of her husband. George’s great passion was the army, which took him away on active service for long periods. When Ernst August took his entire court to Italy for a year, Sophia Dorothea went on the extended holiday without her husband. Reunited with George on her return, she conceived a daughter who was named after her. But thrown back into each other’s company, the strategy of polite coexistence the couple had maintained with some success began to fall apart. Bored and frustrated, Sophia Dorothea began to behave badly; she picked quarrels, caused scenes and was outspokenly impatient of the etiquette that ruled court life, apparently driven both to dominate and to despise the circumstances in which she lived. One observer called her ‘une beauté tyrannique’.9

Her unhappiness was given an edge of anger when she discovered that her taciturn husband had taken another mistress, and one whom he seemed genuinely to love. Melusine von Schulenberg had none of Sophia Dorothea’s physical attractions – she was tall and thin, nicknamed ‘the scarecrow’ by George’s mother – but she was calm, malleable and good-natured, in contrast to Sophia Dorothea’s more febrile character. She sought to manage George’s moods, and make his life easier, whilst his wife seemed only to cause him difficulties. Sophia Dorothea was bitterly humiliated by her husband’s public preference for a woman far less beautiful and of lower social status than herself, and she refused to adopt the wronged wife’s traditional stance of dignified resignation. She scolded her resentful husband, made scenes at court, and complained to her father-in-law. In doing so, not only did she earn the lasting resentment of George’s mother (who could not see why she should not submit quietly to marital infidelity, as she had done), but also made enemies of the powerful Platen women, who disliked Sophia Dorothea’s wilder accusations against mistresses and their wiles. Unhappy, rejected and isolated amongst people who were embarrassed and annoyed by her indiscreet outbursts, Sophia Dorothea was in a very vulnerable state. It is perhaps not surprising that she was so quickly persuaded to do the very worst and dangerous thing she could have done in such circumstances: fall in love with another man.

It was at this inauspicious moment that ‘the famous and beautiful’ Count Philip von Königsmark arrived at the Hanoverian court. He was a Swedish aristocrat, rich, handsome, clever, witty and assured, an archetypal sophisticated bad boy who had gambled, fought and drunk his way across Europe before enlisting as an officer in the Hanoverian service. He was everything Sophia Dorothea’s dour husband was not, and was obviously attracted to her. They enjoyed each other’s company, and when he left to join the army, he began to write to her. Soon the letters they exchanged were those of lovers. At first, they were careful – ‘If I were not writing to a person for whom my respect is as great as my love,’ wrote Königsmark, ‘I should find better terms to express my passion’ – but as their relationship grew more intense, they became less discreet.10

When Königsmark returned, they snatched meetings in corridors, and exchanged glances in ballrooms. People noticed. They became the object of gossip, spread avidly by the Platens. Eventually, even Sophia Dorothea’s mother heard the talk, and begged her daughter to break off the affair. She refused, and for over two years sustained her love for the count through occasional meetings and lengthy correspondence, in which she did not hesitate to declare the strength of her feelings, even confessing she would like to abandon her empty, unsatisfactory life. ‘I thought a thousand times of following you,’ she wrote, ‘what would I not give to be able to do it, and always be with you. But I should be too happy and there is no such bliss in this world.’11

Yet for all her declaration of its impossibility, the idea of starting a new life with Königsmark became an obsession for her. By 1694, both her parents were aware that she wanted to end her twelve-year marriage. Rumours of an impending elopement transfixed the court. Königsmark’s recent appointment as commander of a Saxon regiment seemed to offer the couple both the resources and the opportunity to run away together.

Then in July events came to a sudden and horrible conclusion. Whilst drunk, Königsmark was heard publicly discussing the affair; as a result, he was ordered, allegedly by Ernst August himself, to leave Hanover that very night. He was then seen entering the palace, apparently to say goodbye to his lover. Horace Walpole later heard that with the assistance of Sophia Dorothea’s ladies, ‘he was suffered to kiss her hand before his abrupt departure, and was actually introduced by them into her bedchamber the next morning before she rose’.12 Others maintained he never reached his rendezvous. What is certain is that after his late-night arrival at the Leine palace, Königsmark was never seen again.

Exactly what happened to him remains a mystery. It was widely suspected he had been murdered; his remains were supposed to have been thrown into a river in a sack weighted with stones.13 Nothing was ever definitively proved, and rumours concerning Königsmark’s fate circulated around the princely courts of Europe for years. Walpole, however, believed he knew the truth. A generation later, when Sophia Dorothea’s son George II ordered alterations to be made to his mother’s old apartments at Leine, Walpole was told that the builders made a gruesome discovery: ‘The body of Königsmark was discovered under the floor of the Electoral Princess’s dressing room, the count probably having been strangled the instant he left her, and his body secreted there.’14 This discreditable story was, asserted Walpole, ‘hushed up’, but he claimed that his father, Sir Robert, had heard it directly from George II’s wife, Queen Caroline.

Whatever Königsmark’s fate, it is hard to believe that Ernst August played no part in it. The payment of large sums of money by Ernst to a small group of loyal courtiers shortly after the event seems more than coincidental. Ernst certainly had sufficient motive at least to connive at the killing. After a lifetime of planning and scheming, he had finally achieved the coveted status of elector only two years before, in 1692. The humiliation of his son at the hands of an adulterous wife did not form part of his plan for the continued upward rise of his family’s power and influence. It is unlikely, however, that his role in the affair will ever finally be established. The role played by Sophia Dorothea’s husband in her lover’s disappearance is even harder to assess. Perhaps intentionally, George was away from court at the time of Königsmark’s disappearance. But if he was ignorant of any plans to dispose of the count, he was fully complicit in what now happened to his wife.

Sophia Dorothea was hustled away to a remote castle at Ahlden, Lower Saxony, where she was kept isolated in the strictest confinement. Letters from her were found at Königsmark’s house, and shown to her father who, as a result of what they disclosed, effectively abandoned her. Her mother was refused access to her. Immured alone at Ahlden, she was questioned over and over again about the precise nature of her relationship with Königsmark. She always denied that she had committed what she called ‘le crime’, but the couple’s correspondence contradicted her assertions. In them, Königsmark made it clear how much he hated the thought of Sophia Dorothea having sex – or, as he put it, ‘monter à cheval’ – with her husband. In her replies, Sophia Dorothea reassured him that George was a very poor lover in comparison with himself, and added vehemently that she longed for George to die in battle. It is probable that George was shown these letters, which may explain some of the harshness with which Sophia Dorothea was treated in the months that followed.15

At first, it was hard to know what to do with George’s errant wife. In the end, she was persuaded to become the unwitting author of her own misery. She was encouraged to ask for a separation from her husband, which she did almost willingly, on the grounds that ‘she despaired of ever overcoming the aversion the prince has for several years evinced towards her’.16 It is unlikely she knew at this stage that Königsmark was dead; naively, she may still have hoped to be reunited with him after a separation had taken place. Armed with his wife’s declaration, in December 1694, George was quickly able to obtain a divorce. Sophia Dorothea hoped that afterwards she would be allowed quietly ‘to retire from the world’, expecting to live with her mother at Celle; instead she was returned to Ahlden, where she was locked up and, in all but name, imprisoned.

Any reminders of Sophia Dorothea’s presence were ruthlessly and systematically erased from the Hanoverian court. Her name was struck out of prayers, and all portraits of her taken down. She had become a non-person, and disappeared into a confinement from which she would never emerge. She had not been allowed to say goodbye to her children – twelve-year-old George and seven-year-old Sophia Dorothea – before she was taken away. She would not see them again. Her name was never mentioned to them, and they were forbidden to speak of her. She was permitted to take portraits of them with her, which she regarded as her most precious possessions. When Ernst August died, and her ex-husband inherited his title, she wrote to him, begging to be allowed to see her children. He did not reply. ‘He is so cold, he turns everything to ice,’ commented the Duchess of Orléans sadly.

For the first two years, Sophia Dorothea was held entirely inside the Ahlden castle. Later, she was able to walk outside for half an hour a day. George did not deprive her of money and she lived in some luxury, dressed in the fashionable clothes she had always loved. There were few people to admire them, however. No visitors were permitted. Sophia’s only contact with her family was through the eighty-one pictures of her relations that she had hung on her walls, including one of her ex-husband. She did not read a letter that had not been scrutinised by her gaoler first. Surrounded by a small entourage of elderly ladies, Sophia went nowhere unattended. The boredom of her life seems to have overwhelmed her, and she sought sensation wherever she could find it. On rare outings in her state carriage, she always asked to have the horses driven at the highest possible speed. Her mother, who had been tireless in her appeals to see her daughter, was eventually allowed to visit her; but after her death, Sophia Dorothea saw no one. In 1714, when George crossed the North Sea to take up his new responsibilities in Britain, it was suggested to him that he might now relax the conditions under which his ex-wife dragged out her existence; but he was implacable. Sophia Dorothea endured this shadow of a life for thirty-one years. In 1726, she became seriously ill. Her attendants tried to raise her spirits by showing her the portraits of her children, but when this much relied-upon source of comfort failed, they realised she was dying. A few days later, she was dead.

If George was troubled by guilt at any point throughout her long exile, he gave no sign of it. He never commented on his ill-starred marriage, nor its tragic end. He did not marry again, but lived in apparently placid contentment with Melusine von Schulenberg, whom he later ennobled as the Duchess of Kendal.

Yet there remained in George’s carefully preserved, quiet life an unignorable reminder of a partnership he had never wanted, and which had caused him such public humiliation. The two children he had fathered with Sophia Dorothea could not be expunged or denied. His daughter he seems to have regarded benignly, although she played almost no part in his daily life; but his relationship with his son could not be similarly consigned to the margins of his public world. As his heir, the young Prince George represented a dynastic and political fact which George was compelled to acknowledge. But he could not – and would not – be brought to love the boy.

*

As a child, the prince had been very attractive. An English visitor to Hanover said he had ‘a very winning countenance’. He was small and slender, with fair hair and pale skin, a lively and inquisitive boy. ‘He speaks very gracefully, and with the greatest easiness imaginable, nor does his great vivacity let him be ignorant of anything.’17 He was highly strung, racked by intense emotions, much subject to ‘blushes and tears’. It was impossible not to see in the son the image of his mother, and this sealed his father’s inveterate dislike for him. In later life, Prince George acknowledged in the most matter-of-fact way that his father ‘had always hated him and used him ill’. Disdain, ridicule and indifference were familiar fare. He could think of only one occasion when the old man had found anything complimentary to say about him, and despite its characteristically barbed quality, he quoted it with poignantly transparent pride. As the courtier and diarist, John, Lord Hervey, recounted: ‘When Lord Sunderland had tried to fix some lie on him, the late king (his father) had answered, “No, no. I know my son; he is not a liar, he is mad, but he is an honest man.”’18

It was hardly surprising that by the time he was an adult, George disliked his father as much as his father seemed to despise him. It was plain to everyone who considered it that the great, undiscussed, unresolved nightmare of Sophia Dorothea’s ruined life lay at the heart of their mutual resentment. ‘Whether the prince’s attachment to his mother embittered his mind against his father,’ mused Walpole, ‘or whether hatred of his father occasioned his devotion to her, I do not pretend to know.’19 Prince George was as silent on the painful subject of Sophia Dorothea as was his father. Hervey, who knew him very well when he was king, noticed that although ‘he discoursed so constantly and so openly of himself’, there was one subject that was never brought up. He touched on everything ‘except what related to his mother, whom on no occasion I ever heard him mention, not even inadvertently, or indirectly, as if such a person never existed’.20

Prince George grew into a volatile and unpredictable young man. His temper, which worsened as he grew older, was always explosive. Unlike his taciturn father, who suppressed his brooding antagonisms, his son’s rages were more flamboyant affairs. Always a great talker, the prince’s volubility ran away with him when he was cross; anger provoked in him diatribes of eloquent fury. When words failed him, he was known to throw his wig off and kick it around the room in frustration. It was hardly surprising that, as the Duchess of Marlborough recorded, he was sometimes considered ‘a little bit cracked’.21 In comparison with his father, who never said more than he needed to, George was effusive, in bad moods and good. His happiness was expressed with as much noise and passion as his anger, as anyone who antagonised him soon discovered. His feelings were always strong, and his inability to control them often made him appear ridiculous.

Beneath the frequent empty bluster, though, were more solid qualities. He was genuinely brave, not afraid to do what he thought was right, even at the cost of his reputation. He did not bear political grudges, and had little of his father’s unforgiving rancour. Horace Walpole believed ‘he had fewer sensations of revenge … than any man who ever sat upon a throne’.22 His physical courage was considerable. Trained as a soldier, he served as a cavalry officer with John, 1st Duke of Marlborough, at the Battle of Oudenarde in 1708, when he was twenty-four. He was engaged in the thick of the fighting, charging at the head of his troops, and, when his horse was shot from under him, he mounted another and plunged back into the mêlée. Marlborough thought he had behaved with distinction, and wrote to tell his father so.23 But the elder George refused to allow his son a permanent military role, which bitterly disappointed the prince and did nothing to improve relations between them.

For the rest of his life, George remained devoted to the soldierly ideal. Nothing interested him more than the business of warfare – from grand strategy to the design of a medal or the cut of a uniform. He jealously guarded his right to make senior army appointments, and his love of pomp and pageantry was perhaps a way of staying close to a world from which politics excluded him. In his forties, the desire to be back in the field still burnt just as brightly as it had in his youth. Hervey recalled that he declared ‘almost daily and hourly’ to Sir Robert Walpole that ‘it was with his sword alone that he desired to keep the balance of Europe; that war and action were his sole pleasures; that age was coming on fast to him … He could not bear, he said, the thought of growing old in peace.’ In response, Walpole patiently pointed out that ‘it would not be a very agreeable incident for the King of Great Britain’ to find himself ‘running again through Westphalia with 70,000 Prussians at his heels’.24 (George had his way in the end: in 1743, when he was sixty, and Walpole was no longer around to thwart him, he led troops victoriously into battle once more, against the French at Dettingen near Frankfurt. He was the last British king to do so, a fact that would have delighted him perhaps more than any other accolade.)

George was never a scholar, and loved to boast of his disdain for intellectual ideas. ‘He often used to brag of the contempt he had for books and letters,’ recalled Hervey, ‘saying how much he hated all that stuff from his infancy.’ He said he despised reading even as a child, because he ‘felt as if he was doing something mean and below him’.25 But for all his distrust of the outward manifestations of the life of the mind, George’s antipathy concealed a sharp intellect. He spoke four languages – German, English, French and Italian – and had a quick tongue in all of them. He was a ready deliverer of woundingly pungent phrases or mocking observations, some of which suggested that he read rather more than he was prepared to admit. Like all his family, he loved music (he would become a devoted patron of Handel), but he had no patience with abstract analytical thinking. He was untouched by the new ideas of the Enlightenment that excited so many of his contemporaries, and seems to have been as little interested in traditional religious beliefs as in the philosophical attitudes that had just begun to undermine them. Like his father, he had no real religious feeling, and throughout his life he demonstrated a steady indifference to all things spiritual – with a single exception: he was, as Horace Walpole incredulously reported, prey to a host of superstitious and supernatural fears. ‘He had yet implicit faith in the German notion of vampires,’ the diarist noted, ‘and has more than once been angry with my father for speaking irreverently of these imaginary bloodsuckers.’26

George was not an easy man to understand. Bravery and bombast, principle and passion struggled for mastery in his nature, yet beneath the often grating bravado that defined so much of his behaviour, there occasionally emerged a glimpse of a rather different man: calmer, less swayed by the intensity of feelings he found so hard to control, a more reflective character capable of far greater emotional acuity than he usually revealed. For most of his life, George kept those parts of his personality hidden beneath the image he had created of himself as a blunt, instinctual, plain-speaking man of action. The contrast between this persona and the remote, sinuous unreachableness that defined his father’s character could not have been more extreme. By his every word and action, George sought to present himself as a very different kind of man, demonstrating both to himself and to those about him that he was not destined to repeat the destructive mistakes of his predecessor. He would do things differently; and nowhere more so than in the selection of a wife.

Prince George told his father that he would not make a purely political marriage, but expected to have some say in the choice of a suitable spouse. Somewhat surprisingly, his declaration met with no opposition; perhaps the elder George, lacking in empathy though he was, had no wish to repeat the disastrous outcome of his own forced match. It did not take his son long to fix on the woman he thought would suit him. Caroline, daughter of the Margrave of Ansbach, was highly sought after in the German marriage market. Tall and stately, with an abundance of fair hair and a substantial bosom (said to be the finest in Europe), she had recently refused a very impressive offer from the Archduke Charles, heir to the Holy Roman Emperor. She had baulked at the prospect of converting to Catholicism, and had thus waved goodbye to one of the oldest and grandest of royal titles. Her reputation for beauty – and also for intelligence, for she was said to have debated the issue of her possible religious conversion with incisive skill – was probably well known to George, as Caroline had for many years lived in the Berlin household of his father’s sister, Sophia Charlotte, queen in Prussia. Orphaned aged thirteen, Caroline had grown up under the protection of George’s aunt and his grandmother, Electress Sophia of Hanover. The electress had long hoped to see her grandson married to Caroline, although she ‘doubted that God will let me be so happy’. She did everything she could to force God’s hand, though, and was clearly successful in piquing the young George’s interest in marrying her protégée. ‘I think the prince likes the idea also,’ she observed hopefully, ‘for in talking to him about her, he said “I am very glad that you desire her for me.”’27

When George raised the possibility of marrying Caroline, his father insisted his son should meet her first, and suggested that he do so in disguise, so that he could make an honest assessment of her person and character. In June 1705, George obediently travelled to Ansbach, where he was presented to the unsuspecting Caroline as a Hanoverian nobleman. He was smitten at their very first meeting. As intemperate in passion as in so much else, George insisted for the rest of his life that he had fallen in love with Caroline the moment he saw her. Without declaring himself, he hurried back to Hanover, and urged his father to open negotiations for her hand. Uncharacteristically compliant, the elder George agreed without argument. Significantly, he was concerned to ensure that Caroline shared his son’s enthusiasm for the match, stressing to the diplomatic negotiators that ‘her inclinations should be assured first of all’.28 It did not take long for everyone to be satisfied on that point. Once the identity of the young man whom she had met under such unusual circumstances was explained, it was clear that Caroline had seen something she liked in the intense, emphatic stranger. Perhaps she was impressed by the directness of his desire for her. Perhaps the prospect of marrying the heir presumptive to the British crown appealed more than becoming Holy Roman Empress; she was always considered an ambitious woman, and marriage to George undoubtedly promised access to considerable power and influence, with the additional benefit that it did not require her to become a Catholic. Perhaps she simply felt she could not refuse another well-connected marital prospect. For whatever reason, her consent was quickly given; and George and Caroline were married in Hanover in the early autumn.

Their marriage could not have been more different from that of George’s parents. From the very beginning, his young wife was the central focus of his life. In 1707, when she contracted smallpox, he nursed her throughout the illness, imperilling his own health as a consequence. Two years later, when Caroline gave birth to their eldest daughter, Anne, he wrote her a loving letter from which the warmth of his affection still radiates. ‘The peace of my life depends on knowing you in good health, and upon the conviction of your continued affection for me. I shall endeavour to attract it,’ he assured her, ‘by all imaginable passion and love, and I shall never omit any way of showing you that no one could be more wholly yours.’29 Theirs was a partnership founded on passion – on George’s side at least. ‘It is certain,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘that the king always preferred the queen’s person to any other woman; nor ever described his idea of beauty, but that he drew a picture of his wife.’30 For the rest of his life, Caroline exerted a physical attraction over him that was never truly extinguished, even when her youthful prettiness had been compromised by childbearing and her stately dignity edged into fat. Caroline was proud of her sexual hold over her husband; when she was over fifty, she showed Robert Walpole a letter George had written to her from Hanover which ‘spoke of his extreme impatience for their meeting; and in a style that would have made one believe him the rival of Hercules’ vigour and her of Venus’ beauty, her person being mentioned in the most exalted strains of rapture’.31

Caroline responded to the blitzkrieg of George’s passion by surrendering herself entirely to it. She never looked at another man, and did everything she could to keep her mercurial husband satisfied. Her submission to him went far beyond the purely physical. From the day of her marriage until the day she died, over thirty years later, she rarely had a thought or performed an action that was not designed in some way to please him: ‘To him she sacrificed her time, for him she breathed every inclination; she looked, spake and breathed but for him, was a weathercock to every blast of his uncertain temper.’32 Whether she did this out of love, or whether as a means of exercising through her husband the power and influence otherwise denied her as a woman, was the subject of constant speculation. Most thought that power played a large part in her calculations.

The complicated intensity of their relationship fascinated all those who witnessed it, and many contemporaries sought to explain and unpick its curious dynamic, the strange combination of attraction, manipulation and destructiveness that characterised their life together. For all the self-absorption of the couple at its centre, this was far from a conventionally happy marriage. Between George’s sexual thraldom and Caroline’s self-abnegating submission, some very dark currents seemed to flow; and many of those who found themselves caught in the eddies and undertows thus created were permanently damaged by the experience, not least the couple’s children, none of whom could be said to have emerged happily from the private world their parents created for themselves.

Perhaps theirs would have always been a marriage characterised by internal tension. It was, in many ways, an example of the attraction of opposites. They did not even look very well matched. Caroline was far taller than her husband, whose lack of height, slender build and love of overdressed magnificence inevitably attracted the epithet ‘dapper’. She was dignified and magisterial, though large in later life. One observer likened Caroline and her Maids of Honour, all dressed in pink, making their way through a crowded court, to a lobster pursued by shrimps. Caroline had little interest in the physical pursuits that George enjoyed, although she gamely accompanied him on his favourite stag hunts. Left to herself, Caroline preferred less punishing activities. She was a dedicated and accomplished gardener, later laying out and improving the parks at Richmond and Kew. George, who did not share her interest, refused to look at her ambitious plans, declaring that he ‘did not care how she flung away her own revenue’. He did not know that, having long ago exhausted her own resources in pursuing her gardening passions, she had persuaded Robert Walpole to subsidise her projects from Treasury funds.

While Caroline had no idea how to manage her own income, and was always in debt, George’s attitude to expenditure was very different: he was a compulsive hoarder of cash, regarded by most people who knew him as mean in a way unbefitting the grandeur of his position. Although his sympathies could be engaged by worthy causes – he contributed £2,000 to help establish London’s Foundling Hospital – George was always a more reluctant donor than his wife. It was all but impossible to prise money out of his hands; he even sought to wriggle out of annuities he had promised to pay his own daughters. Hervey thought it was hard to say whether passion for armies or for money predominated in his mind: ‘he could never have enough of either, and could seldom be persuaded to part with either, though he had more of both than he had any occasion to employ’.33

Walpole once observed that George would rather have found a guinea in his pocket than have a work of literature dedicated to him. In contrast to the resolute philistinism of her husband, Caroline was completely at home in the world of books and ideas. She had ‘read a great deal’, noted Hervey with approval. ‘She understood good writing too, in English, the harmony of numbers in verse, the beauty of style in prose, and the force and propriety of terms much better than anyone who has only heard her speak English would ever have thought possible. She had a most incredible memory, and was learned both in ancient and modern history as the most learned men.’34 Caroline was an intellectual woman who had been raised among other intellectual women. In the household in which she had grown up, the Electress Sophia and her daughter Sophia Charlotte had created a remarkable salon in which the greatest minds of their generation were invited to discuss the philosophical questions of the day. As a girl, Caroline had been an eager participant in the debates and arguments that dominated the days of these thoughtful princesses. The mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz acted as the resident in-house thinker of the Hanoverian women at Sophia Charlotte’s palace. He liked the young Caroline, although he sometimes found himself at the sharp end of her wit and thought her a little too fond of scoring points of argument at the expense of others. ‘I have a most bitter tongue,’ confessed Caroline in later years. There was little evidence here of the traditional pursuits of royal women – the fascination with scandal, needlework, dress and display that Caroline described dismissively as ‘paltry’. Instead, Sophia Charlotte turned her mind to bigger questions – ‘the why of why’, as Leibniz called it. No subject was off limits, and a scepticism towards traditional theology was much in evidence. (On her deathbed, Sophia Charlotte, who died at the age of only thirty-seven, refused the ministrations of a priest. ‘Do not pity me,’ she told those gathered around her, including a heartbroken Caroline; ‘I am going at last to satisfy my curiosity about the origin of things which even Leibniz could never explain to me, to understand space, infinity, being and nothingness.’35)

This was not a world in which Caroline’s husband would have felt at ease. Although Walpole believed George’s ‘understanding was not near so deficient as it was imagined’, intellectual discussion bored and unsettled him.36 When she became queen, Caroline sought to recreate in London the salon she had found so stimulating as a girl in Berlin; but the scorn of her husband cast a shadow over her efforts. Hervey noted with regret that she did not dare allow herself to indulge in the philosophical discussions she so enjoyed, ‘for fear of the king, who often rebuked her for dabbling in all that learned nonsense (as he called it)’.37 Nor did he share her artistic interests. Once, when George was away in Hanover, Caroline and Hervey took ‘several very bad pictures out of the great Drawing Room at Kensington, and put very good ones in their place’. When George returned he was furious, and insisted that Hervey have ‘every new picture taken away and all the old ones replaced’. When asked if any of the newly transplanted paintings might be allowed to remain, the king was adamant all must go, especially ‘the picture with the dirty frame over the door, and the three nasty little children’. Thus dismissing Van Dyck’s masterly portrait of the children of Charles I, he told the disdainful Hervey that he especially wanted the painting of his ‘gigantic fat Venus’ returned. ‘I am not as nice as your lordship. I like my fat Venus much better than anything you have given me instead of her.’38

Caroline was not the first royal wife to find herself married to a man whose mind did not match her own. Her Berlin mentor, Sophia Charlotte, found little common intellectual ground with her own princely husband, who, like Caroline’s George, preferred the study of pageantry and military decorations to the contemplation of big ideas. ‘Leibniz talked to me today of the infinitely little,’ Sophia once remarked. ‘My God, as though I did not know enough about that already.’39 Such a comment would never have escaped Caroline’s lips. She decided early in their marriage that her intellect, of which she was justifiably proud, would never be used to undermine her husband, but would be dedicated instead to the strengthening and consolidation of their partnership. From the day she married George, she saw the preservation of their union and the advancement of their interests as the paramount duty of her role as his wife. She began as she meant to go on. As soon as she arrived in Hanover as a married woman, she took lessons in English, and persuaded her learning-averse husband to do the same. Leibniz heard that Caroline ‘had a decided turn for that language’ and that George was also making excellent progress. While he never lost his ‘his bluff Westphalian accent’, George was, Walpole thought, later to speak the language with far more ‘correctness’ than his wife. Caroline’s determination to master the language of the people she would one day rule was only part of a wider campaign to win their hearts and minds. She had already begun to plan for the moment when her father-in-law would inherit the British crown, and she and George would become Prince and Princess of Wales. The British envoy to Hanover noted that she behaved with special courtesy to British visitors; she employed British ladies in her household; ordered English novels to read; and had even begun to drink tea.

Her father-in-law viewed all these acts with the deepest suspicion, believing, with some justification, that his son and daughter-in-law were seeking to secure their own position at the cost of his own. When Queen Anne’s government somewhat unwisely offered the title of Duke of Cambridge to Prince George, his father was incensed, seeing it as a sign that his future British subjects sought the favour of his son more than they did his own. It hardened his resolve to treat the prince ‘as a person of no consequence’; nor did it make him feel more warmly disposed towards Caroline. Recognising her intelligence, he was convinced she encouraged the prince in what he regarded as acts of defiance, and referred to her as ‘cette diablesse Mme la Princesse’.

Caroline’s success in providing the dynasty with a male heir in 1707 did nothing to alter her father-in-law’s hostile attitude. On the contrary, the rejoicings in both England and Hanover that greeted the baby Frederick’s arrival only increased his suspicion of their popularity, and he refused to pay for any celebrations to mark the child’s birth. The appearance of a succession of other children – all daughters – between 1709 and 1713 was similarly ignored; and by the time the long-awaited call to Britain arrived in 1714, with the death of Queen Anne, the breach between the king and the prince was wider than ever.

*

The future George I arrived in London first, accompanied by his son. The three young princesses came next, with Caroline herself following on last. Her tardy departure perhaps reflected a reluctance to leave her only son, who, George I had decreed, would not travel with the rest of the family to London. Frederick was to stay in Hanover as a living reminder to the Hanoverians that their ruling family had not deserted them. Although he was only seven years old, Frederick was expected to preside over state functions, sitting alongside a large portrait of his elector grandfather propped up on a chair. He was not to see his family again for nearly fourteen years.

Once in London, it was quickly evident that the new king would much rather have stayed in Hanover with his grandson and his portrait. His new subjects were far from united in welcoming the incoming ruling family, some of them making their preference for the exiled Stuarts very apparent by word, gesture or riot. George I, for his part, was equally unenthused. He disliked England and its inhabitants from the start. It was soon noticed that ‘the king has no predilection for the English nation and never receives in private any English of either sex’, preferring to spend his time with his mistress, smoking a pipe and drinking German beer.40 His inability to speak the language isolated him – he was said to conduct political business with Robert Walpole in Latin – and he did not understand the complicated and somewhat ambivalent status of an English king, which left him with the strong conviction that the first objective of his new countrymen was to rob and insult him. The French ambassador reported that such was George’s dislike of his new kingdom that he did not consider it anything more ‘than a temporary possession to be made the most of whilst it lasts, rather than a perpetual inheritance to himself and his family’.41

His son and his wife took a very different view. From the moment of their arrival, they strove to do all they could to impress and conciliate their new countrymen. The prince, though not yet completely fluent in English, showed a winning desire to improve, and would help himself out when words failed him ‘with a world of action’. He and Caroline were effusive in their praise for their new homeland, the prince calling the English ‘the best, the handsomest, the best shaped, the best natured and lovingest people in the world; if anyone would make their court to him, it must be by telling him he was like an Englishman’.42 Caroline, who was already regarded as ‘so charming that she could make anyone love her if she would’, employed a more vivid turn of phrase, declaring that she ‘would as soon live on a dunghill as return to Hanover’.43

It was hardly surprising that, as the courtier Peter Wentworth observed: ‘I find all backward in speaking to the king but ready enough to speak to the prince.’44 King George could not fail to be aware of the contrast between his embattled and unpopular position, and that of his son and daughter-in-law. The result was inevitable. The Duchess of Orléans, an avid transmitter of all the royal gossip of Europe, heard that things had gone from bad to worse between George I and his son. ‘His quarrel with the Prince of Wales gets worse every day. I always thought him harsh when he was in Germany, but English air has hardened him still more.’45

George and Caroline must bear some of the blame for what happened next. In making the contrast between their own reception and that of George I quite so plain, they had not, perhaps, behaved in the most tactful manner; they had burnished their own reputations and secured their own interests with scant consideration for the impact it would have on the new king. They must have realised their actions would elicit some response from a man whose brooding character they both knew very well. But they cannot have expected him to strike against them in the way that he did, in an action that was to echo miserably through the family for the rest of their lives.

It began with what should have been a celebration. On 13 November 1717, Caroline gave birth to a second son, a long-awaited boy after so many daughters, and the first Hanoverian to be born in Britain. The prince was delighted, and made arrangements for a grand christening. He asked his father and his uncle, the Prince-Bishop of Osnabrück, to stand as the baby’s godfathers. To this the king initially agreed; but just before the ceremony, the king insisted that the prince-bishop be replaced by the Duke of Newcastle, a politician he knew his son particularly disliked. Furious at what he perceived as a gross humiliation, the young George smouldered his way through the proceedings, held in Caroline’s bedroom. Walpole heard from his friend Lady Suffolk, who had been one of the shocked spectators, exactly what followed: ‘No sooner had the bishop closed the ceremony, than the prince crossing the feet of the bed in a rage, stepped up to the Duke of Newcastle, and holding up his hand and forefinger in a menacing attitude, said, “You are a rascal, but I shall find you out,” meaning in broken English, “I shall find a time to be revenged.”’46 Newcastle, deeply disconcerted, asserted that the prince had challenged him to fight a duel, a very serious offence within the precincts of a royal palace. He complained to the king, who had been present but had not understood a word of what was said. George I immediately decided to regard his son’s words in the worst possible light. He told the prince to consider himself under arrest and confined both George and Caroline to their apartments.

Prince George, alarmed by the escalating gravity of the situation, wrote an unequivocally submissive letter to his father, admitting that he had used those words to Newcastle, but denying that they were intended to provoke a duel and begging forgiveness. The king was unmoved; he ordered the prince to leave the palace immediately. The princess, he said, could remain only if she promised to have no further communication with her husband. He then informed the distraught couple that under no circumstances would their children leave with them. Even the newborn baby was to be left behind. ‘You are charged to say to the princess,’ declared the king to his son, ‘that it is my will that my grandson and my granddaughters are to stay at St James’s.’47 When Caroline declined to abandon her husband, the baby prince, only a few weeks old, was taken from his mother’s arms. The couple’s daughters, aged nine, seven and five, were sent to bid their parents a formal farewell. The princess was so overwrought that she fainted; her ladies thought she was about to die.

Separated from their children and exiled from their home, the couple composed a desperate appeal to the king. It made no difference. Saying that their professions of respect and subservience were enough ‘to make him vomit’, the elder George demanded that the prince sign a formal renunciation of his children, giving them up to his guardianship. When he refused, the king deprived the prince and princess of their guard of honour, wrote to all foreign courts and embassies informing them that no one would be welcomed by him who had anything to do with his son, and ordered anyone who held posts in both his and his son’s households – from chamberlain to rat-catcher – to surrender one of them, for he would employ nobody who worked for the prince.

At St James’s, Caroline’s baby son, taken away from his mother in such distressing circumstances, suddenly fell ill. As the child grew steadily worse, the doctors called in to treat him begged the king to send for his mother. He refused to do so, until finally persuaded that if the boy died, it would reflect extremely badly on him. He relented enough to permit the princess to see her child, but with the proviso that the baby must be removed to Kensington, as he did not want her to come to St James’s. The journey proved too much for the weakened child, and before his frantic mother could get to him, he died, ‘of choking and coughing’, on 17 February 1718. In her grief, Caroline was said to have cried out that she did not believe her son had died of natural causes; but a post-mortem – admittedly undertaken by court physicians who owed their livings to the king – seemed to show that the child had a congenital weakness and could not have lived long.

The distraught parents were unable to draw any consolation from their surviving children. Their son Frederick was far away in Hanover; their daughters were closeted in St James’s, where the king, clearly thinking the situation a permanent one, had appointed the widowed Countess of Portland to look after them. They were not badly treated; but, having effectively lost both her sons, Caroline found the enforced separation from her daughters all but unbearable. The prince wrote constantly to his father, attempting to raise sympathy for his wife’s plight: ‘Pity the poor princess and suffer her not to think that the children which she shall with labour and sorrow bring into the world, if the hand of heaven spare them, are immediately to be torn from her, and instead of comforts and blessings, be made an occasion of grief and affliction to her.’ Eventually the king relented, and allowed Caroline to visit her daughters once a week; but he would not extend the same privilege to his son. ‘If the detaining of my children from me is meant as a punishment,’ the prince wrote sadly, ‘I confess it is of itself a very severe method of expressing Your Majesty’s resentment.’48 Six months later, the prince had still been denied any opportunity to see his daughters. Missing their father as much as he missed them, the little girls picked a basket of cherries from the gardens at Kensington, and managed to send them to him with a message ‘that their hearts and thoughts were always with their dear Papa’.49 The prince was said to have wept when he received their present.

Not content with persecuting his son by dividing his family, the king also pursued him with all the legal and political tools at his disposal. When he attempted to force the prince to pay for the upkeep of the daughters he had forcibly removed from him, George sought to raise the legality of the seizure in the courts, but was assured that the law would favour the king. His father’s enmity seemed to know no rational bounds. In Berlin, the king’s sister heard gossip that he was attempting to disinherit the prince on the grounds that he was not his true child. He was certainly known to have consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it was possible to debar him from succeeding to the electorate of Hanover; the Chancellor thought not. This unwelcome opinion may have driven him to consider less orthodox methods of marginalising his son. Years later, when the old king was dead and Caroline was queen, she told Sir Robert Walpole that by chance she had discovered in George I’s private papers a document written by Charles Stanhope, an Undersecretary of State, which discussed a far more direct method of proceeding. The prince was ‘to be seized and Lord Berkeley will take him on board ship and convey him to any part of the world that Your Majesty shall direct’.50 Berkeley was First Lord of the Admiralty in 1717, and his family held extensive lands in Carolina. Like the Hanover disinheritance plan, it came to nothing, and relied for its veracity entirely on Caroline’s testimony; but it is a measure of the king’s angry discontent with his son that such a ludicrous scheme could seem credible, even to his hostile and embittered daughter-in-law.

When Sir Robert Walpole came to power a few years later, in 1721, relations between the king and his son’s family were still deadlocked in bitter hostility. The new first minister was convinced the situation, at once tragic and ridiculous, would have to change. Not only was it damaging to the emotional wellbeing of all those caught up in it; more worryingly, to Walpole’s detached politician’s eye, it also posed a threat to the precarious reputation of the newly installed royal house. This was not how the eighteenth century’s supreme ministerial pragmatist thought public life should be conducted; if the king and his son could not be brought to love each other, they could surely be made to see the benefits of a formal reconciliation that would ensure some degree of political calm. Walpole worked on the king with all his unparalleled powers of persuasion; he did the same with the prince, and made some progress with both. But it was Caroline who proved most resistant to his appeals. She demanded that the restoration of her children be made a condition of any public declaration of peace with her father-in-law. In the face of Walpole’s protestations that George I would never agree, and that it was better to take things step by step, she was implacable. ‘Mr Walpole,’ she assured him, ‘this is no jesting matter with me; you will hear of my complaints every day and hour and in every place if I have not my children again.’51

Horace Walpole thought Caroline’s ‘resolution’ was as strong as her understanding – and left to herself, it seems unlikely that she would ever have given up her demands for her children’s return – but she was undermined by the person from whom she might have expected the most support. The prince, tempted by the offer of the substantial income Walpole had squeezed out of the king, and an apparently honourable way out of the political wilderness, was prepared to compromise, and, despite his wife’s opposition, accepted terms that did not include the restitution of his daughters. He and Caroline would be allowed to visit the girls whenever they wished, but they were to remain living with their grandfather at St James’s Palace. Caroline was devastated. The courtier Lady Cowper witnessed her grief: ‘She cried and said, “I see how these things go; I must be the sufferer at last, and have no power to help myself; I can say, since the hour that I was born, that I have never lived a day without suffering.”’52

Caroline’s outburst said as much about her future prospects as her present unhappiness. Her husband had demonstrated in the most painful way possible that he lacked her capacity both for deep feeling and for consistent, considered action. It was not that George did not love his daughters – he was genuinely distressed by their absence, and felt the loss of their company – but he was not prepared to sacrifice all his interests on their behalf. Nor, much as he loved his wife, would he allow her openly to dictate how he should behave in the public sphere. It was a hard lesson that Caroline took much to heart. Even on matters that touched them in the very core of their being, the prince could not necessarily be depended upon to do either the right or the politic thing. That did not make her abandon the partnership to which she had committed when she married him, but she was compelled to accept that what could not be achieved by the open alliance of equals might be much better delivered by management and manipulation.

The king expressed a similar view when the reconciliation was finally achieved, and the prince was formally received by his father in a ceremony that reminded Lady Cowper of ‘two armies in battle array’. George I saw his son privately for only a painful ten minutes, but devoted over an hour to haranguing his daughter-in-law on her failures. ‘She could have made the prince better if she would,’ he declared; and he hoped she would do so from now on. Caroline had reached much the same conclusion. For the next twenty years, she did all she could to ensure that her husband was encouraged and persuaded to follow paths that she believed served the best interests of their crown. By the time Lord Hervey watched her do it, she had turned it into a fine art. ‘She knew … how to instil her own sentiments, whilst she affected to receive His Majesty’s; she could appear convinced whilst she was controverting, and obedient when she was ruling; by this means, her dexterity and address made it impossible for anybody to persuade him what was truly the case, and that while she was seemingly in every occasion giving up her opinion to his, she was always in reality turning his opinion and bending his will to hers.’53

In one sense, it was not an unsuccessful policy. Her patience and self-effacement ensured that Caroline was able to achieve much of what she wanted in her management of her husband. Above all, she preserved the unity of their partnership. Throughout all their tribulations, in private and in public, she strained every sinew to prevent any permanent rupture dividing them. Whether the threat came from a discontented father, a predatory mistress, an unsatisfactory child, or a potentially disruptive politician, Caroline devoted all her skills to neutralising any possibility of a serious breach between them. It was clear to her that they were infinitely stronger as a like-minded couple than as competing individuals who would inevitably become the focus for antagonistic and destructive opposition. But although in later years she took some pride in the tireless efforts she had directed to maintaining their solidarity, she was aware that it had not been achieved without cost. To be locked into a pattern of perpetual cozening and cajolery was wounding and exhausting for her and demeaning for her husband. It kept them together; but it was not the best foundation upon which to base a marriage. In the end, despite the strength of the feelings that united them, both she and George were, in their different ways, warped and belittled by it.

As Caroline had feared, her elder daughters were never restored to her while the old king lived. She went on to have other children: William in 1721, Mary in 1723 and finally Louisa in 1724. But it was not until George I died, in 1727, from a stroke suffered while travelling through the German countryside he loved, that Anne, Amelia and Caroline came back to live with their parents again. By then it was too late to establish the stable home life that Caroline had hoped to provide for them. Before they had been taken from her, she had been a careful mother to her girls. ‘No want of care, or failure or neglect in any part of their education can be imputed to the princess,’ her husband had written in one of his many fruitless appeals to his father.54 Caroline’s daughters would never waver in their devotion to her; but their long estrangement from their father – and the constant criticism of his behaviour which they heard from their grandfather for nearly a decade – meant that on their return his eldest daughters regarded him with distinctly sceptical eyes. When they saw for themselves how he treated their mother – the strange mixture of obsession and disdain, passion and resentment, respect and rudeness, the destructive combination of warring emotions that had come to characterise George’s attitude to his wife – any tenderness they once had for him soon evaporated. It was hardly an attractive vision of domestic happiness with which to begin a new reign.

CHAPTER 2
A Passionate Partnership

GEORGE AND CAROLINE WERE AT their summer retreat at Richmond Lodge on 25 June 1727, when Robert Walpole arrived with the news of George I’s death. It was the middle of a hot day, and the royal couple were asleep; their attendants were extremely reluctant to wake them, but George was eventually persuaded to emerge from his bedroom and discover that he was now king.

It was only seven months since George’s estranged mother had died in the castle at Ahlden. Although George could never bring himself to speak about Sophia Dorothea, he did make a single gesture towards her memory that suggests much of what he felt but could not say. The day after the news arrived of his father’s death, the courtier Lady Suffolk told Walpole she was startled ‘at seeing hung up in the new queen’s dressing room a whole-length portrait of a lady in royal robes; and in the bed-chamber a half-length of the same person, neither of which Lady Suffolk had seen before’.1 The pictures were of Sophia Dorothea. Her son must have salvaged them from the general destruction of all her images ordered by his father a generation before. ‘The prince had kept them concealed, not daring to produce them in his father’s lifetime.’ Now George was king, and his mother was restored – albeit without comment – to a place of honour within the private heart of the family. Walpole heard that if she had lived long enough to witness his accession, George ‘had purposed to have brought her over and declared her queen dowager’. Her death had denied him the opportunity to release his mother from her long captivity, to act as the agent of her freedom. Perhaps it was some small satisfaction to see her image where he had been unable to see her person; it was certainly a gesture of defiance towards the man who kept her from him, and a declaration of loyalty and affection towards his mother that he had never been able to make while his father lived.

The new king and queen were crowned in October, in a typically eighteenth-century ceremony that combined grandeur with chaos. Tickets were sold in advance for the event, and small booths erected around Westminster for the selling of coffee to the anticipated crowds.2 The Swiss traveller de Saussure went to watch and noted that it took two hours for the royal procession to wend its way to the abbey. Handel’s Zadok the Priest – which would be performed at every subsequent coronation – was given its first airing in the course of the ceremony, at which George and Caroline appeared sumptuously clothed and loaded down with jewellery, some of it, as it later appeared, borrowed for the day. The choristers were not considered to have acquitted themselves well – at one point, they were heard to be singing different anthems. After the ceremony was over and the grander participants had left, de Saussure watched as a hungrier crowd moved methodically over the remains of the event, carrying away anything that could be either eaten or sold.3

*

By the time John, Lord Hervey, joined George and Caroline’s court in 1730, the couple had been on the throne for three years, and married for twenty-five. The patterns of their lives, both as king and queen and husband and wife, were thus very well established when Hervey began to chronicle them. Hervey’s official court title was vice chamberlain. He later described his job dismissively as one that required him to do no more than ‘to carry candles and set chairs’, but in practice, it was a far from nominal office, giving him direct responsibility for the management and upkeep of all the royal palaces. It certainly did not imply any shortcomings in social status. Hervey was extremely well connected, heir to the Earl of Bristol, and an aristocrat of unimpeachable Whig principles. He was also a man who made a career from defying expectations and outraging traditional moralists. There was nothing conventional about any aspect of Hervey’s life.

Even in a family considered remarkable for the production of extraordinary people – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu once declared that ‘this world consists of men, women and Herveys’ – he stood out above the rest. He married one of the most beautiful women of his generation, and had eight children by her; he conducted casual affairs with a host of other fashionable ladies of the court; but the great love of his life was another man. His sexuality was a barely concealed secret. Slight and slender, he had been considered outstandingly attractive as a young man. In later life, he used cosmetics to enhance his fading looks, with results that were not always successful. Inevitably, Hervey attracted attention, not all of it admiring. The Duchess of Marlborough once referred scornfully to his ‘painted face with not a tooth in his head’.4 In spiteful verse, Alexander Pope described him as an ‘amphibious thing’, ‘a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings’. He was caricatured everywhere in prose as ‘Lord Fanny’. One of his many enemies described him as a ‘delicate little hermaphrodite, a pretty little Master Miss’.5

Perhaps it was the complexities of his own life that gave Hervey such a profound curiosity for the oddities of others. Certainly, it seems to have been what kept him so firmly in George and Caroline’s orbit for so many years. His warmest relationship was with Caroline, with whom he spent nearly all his time. He was a clever man, well read and accomplished, equally at home in the worlds of politics, ideas and culture. Caroline, starved of intellectual companionship, found him stimulating and amusing, enjoying his dry, mordant humour which closely reflected her own. Both loved to gossip, and could be unsparing in the cruelty of the comments they directed at those they disliked. The queen indulged her favourite to an extraordinary degree, encouraging his frankness and sharing some of her most intimate thoughts with him. Alone among her courtiers, he was encouraged to contradict her. According to his own account, she soon came to consider Hervey as indispensable to her happiness, calling him ‘her child, her pupil and her charge’.6

Although Hervey’s principal loyalty was always to Caroline, he was just as interested in her husband, who seems to have regarded the constant presence in his household of this unusual figure entirely benignly. For all his loudly declared prejudices, George II was not, it seems, much troubled by the private lives of those around him. Perhaps he simply did not notice, as his self-absorption gave him little interest in contemplating the behaviour of others. In this, he was very different from Hervey, who found the family he lived with endlessly fascinating. Throughout his time at court he kept a detailed journal of everything that he witnessed there. He later assembled the entries into a memoir that contained everything he thought important or illuminating about the years he had spent in such intimate proximity with the royal family. The result was a three-volume work dominated by two overpowering central figures. Hervey records in compelling detail, over nearly a thousand pages, the words and actions of George and Caroline, who emerge as the flawed anti-heroes of his writings, appallingly larger than life; and, as Hervey effortlessly demonstrated, caught in a web of deceit, obsession and self-destruction that bound them together just as powerfully as it destroyed them. Hervey was George and Caroline’s Boswell; the work he left behind him is a portrait of the dark and often bitter thing their marriage had become.

Hervey did not pretend to be objective in his judgements. He was always, at heart, Caroline’s man, magnifying her good qualities – especially her wit and intelligence – whilst contrasting them with the boorish outbursts of her irritable husband. George is not well served by Hervey’s account of him, which makes much of his bumptiousness and self-regard, and has less to say about his more admirable characteristics: his diligence, his bravery, his occasional flashes of genuine charity. And yet for all the bright colouration of Hervey’s rendering, neither George nor Caroline emerges from his pages as a caricature. George is depicted as a complicated figure, defensive of his own virtues, naively unaware of the impression his behaviour makes on others, exacting, punctilious, somewhat of a bore; but also honest, pragmatic, and capable of considerable tenderness when his emotions were engaged. Above all, Hervey captured the deep ambivalence of his feelings for his wife – at once passionately in love and yet uneasy and ashamed at the degree of his dependency on her.

In Caroline, Hervey depicted a woman of strong and subtle intellect, the possessor of a forceful mind too often bent to trivial purposes. She could be wickedly funny, and perceptive – entertaining company for those who could keep up and were not provoked by her sharp tongue. This was the Caroline whom Hervey adored, the queenly wit who could cap a classical quotation whilst laughing unashamedly at his gossip. But he was not afraid to record a steelier side of her personality, a brusque hardness that sometimes shocked even the worldly Hervey with its cruel edge. The power of her hatred impressed itself upon him as much as the strength of her mind. And yet it was her situation that most evoked his pity: a woman who had concealed the cleverness that defined her beneath a lifelong subjection to the smallest and most mundane of her husband’s wishes, the better to manipulate him into doing what she wished; and who, as a result, became as much her husband’s victim as his puppet master.

Hervey had no doubt that, whatever it had cost her to establish it, Caroline’s influence extended way beyond the intimate family circle. As soon as George II was crowned, ‘the whole world began to feel that it was her will which was the sole spring on which every movement in the court turned; and though His Majesty lost no opportunity to declare that the queen never meddled with his business, yet nobody believed it … since everybody knew that she not only meddled with business, but directed everything that fell under that name, either at home or abroad’.7 Horace Walpole’s account seems to confirm Hervey’s assertion that Caroline was indeed a discreet but efficient manipulator of influence, a hidden power behind the throne. Walpole asserted that his father, Sir Robert, would often discuss matters of policy privately with the queen before raising them with the king. Both understood the importance of concealing their machinations from George, who was extremely sensitive to any suggestion of interference from his wife. If Walpole arrived for an audience with the king when Caroline was present, she would curtsey politely and offer to leave. Walpole argued that George was entirely deceived by this carefully choreographed piece of theatre, declaring naively to his first minister: ‘there, you see how much I am governed by my wife, as they say I am’. Caroline played her own part to perfection. ‘Oh sir,’ she replied, ‘I must indeed be vain to pretend to govern Your Majesty.’8 But as George’s comments reveal, the idea that it was Caroline and not he who drove forward the business of government was not confined to the inner sanctum of the court. With evident satisfaction, Hervey transcribed into his journals a popular poetic jibe that summed up the perceived balance of power between George II and his wife:

You may strut, dapper George, but ’twill all be in vain,

We know ’tis Queen Caroline and not you that reign –

You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain,

Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,

Lock up your fat spouse, as your dad did before you.9

Recent scholarship has tended to turn a sceptical eye on some of the more extravagant claims made for Caroline’s role as the éminence grise of British politics. Historians have suggested that both Hervey and Walpole had their own reasons for accentuating her role and diminishing that of her husband; as Caroline’s most devoted admirer, Hervey was keen to elevate her virtues in comparison to what he regarded as the emptier pretensions of her husband. Sir Robert Walpole, too, was strongly identified with Caroline, having allied himself with her very early in her husband’s reign. He had quickly recognised that it was she who exerted the most influence over the king and had worked very hard to recruit her into his orbit. With characteristic bluntness, he later congratulated himself in having taken ‘the right sow by the ear’. Once established as her ally, it suited him to talk up her influence, thus magnifying his own access to the apparent wellsprings of power. It was also perhaps the case that George was unlucky in those areas of policy in which he did excel. The image of George II as an ineffectual ruler, overshadowed by his wife, was made more credible by the relative indifference of so many of his new subjects to those areas in which he exerted genuine influence: military strategy and the complicated politics of princely Germany. Both were of some significance to the exercise of kingship in eighteenth-century Europe; but neither Hervey nor Walpole was particularly interested in them, and until recently, most historians have tended to share their perceptions.

George’s reputation has been considerably enhanced by a new interest in these aspects of his reign; but in re-evaluating his role, it would be wrong to excise Caroline altogether from the landscape of political life. When the king was away on his frequent and often lengthy trips to his Hanoverian electorate, on every occasion until her death, it was Caroline who was given responsibility for heading the Regency Council which governed in George’s absence.10 This involved her directly in the daily business of politics, and required her to spend a great deal of time in the company of politicians. Her relationship with the wily and effective Sir Robert Walpole spanned a decade, and was built on a foundation of wary but mutual respect that ended only with her final illness. As Hervey observed, Caroline positively enjoyed political life. Her philosophical readings had given her an interest in the theory of political organisation, and she liked to reflect on the constitutional peculiarities of her adopted home. ‘My God,’ she once declared to Hervey, ‘what a figure this poor island would make in Europe if it were not for its government! … Who the devil do you think would take you all, or think you worth having, that had anything else, if you had not your liberties?’11

Caroline was astute enough to recognise that this was the kind of eulogy a British monarch was required to deliver in order to retain the affections of the people; but it does not seem to have been a particularly honest reflection of her private opinions. Hervey thought that in her heart, the queen’s politics were closer to those of her husband. George was suspicious of the constitutional settlement over which he was obliged to preside, and ‘looked upon all the English as king-killers and republicans, grudged them their riches as well as their liberty [and] thought them all overpaid’. He much preferred the way things were done in Hanover, for ‘there he rewarded people for doing their duty and serving him well, but here he was obliged to enrich people for being rascals and buy them not to cut his throat’.12 To Hervey, Caroline expressed similar frustrations with the limits of royal power, as the Glorious Revolution had defined it, complaining that in England, a king was ‘no more than the humble servant of Parliament, the pensioner of his people, and a puppet of sovereignty that was forced to go to them for every shilling he wanted, that was obliged to court those who were always abusing him, and could do nothing himself’.13 In public, she was far more measured. ‘The business of princes,’ she declared, ‘is to make the whole go on, and not to encourage or suffer silly, impertinent, personal piques between their servants to hinder the business of government being done.’14 For Caroline, the world of politics as she understood it bore a striking resemblance to the life she had made for herself at home. In the end, both came down to questions of management.

Whatever the reality of Caroline’s political role, it is hard to imagine that George was indifferent to the powerful contemporary perception that in matters of government, it was she and not he who was in charge. For a man whose self-esteem was so dependent on the respect and admiration of others, this must have been a painful experience. To be found wanting in the arena where men – and royal men in particular – were expected to excel, unchallenged by even the brightest of women, was particularly humiliating. In the public world, as he came to recognise, there seemed little he could do about it. The more he denied it, the more it seemed as if it might be true. But George knew that there were other areas of his and Caroline’s life together where he remained effortlessly dominant, where his primacy was secure and uncompromised: in the most intimate dimension of their private world there was no question whose will it was that governed, and who was required to submit to it.

From the earliest years of their marriage, George had taken mistresses. He did so not because he did not love Caroline, but because he was afraid that otherwise it might look as if he loved her too much. Horace Walpole thought he ‘was more attracted by a silly idea he entertained of gallantry being becoming, than by a love of variety’. His infidelities made him seem more a man of the world and less of a besotted husband. When he was Prince of Wales, George followed long-established tradition in selecting his lovers from the household of his wife. He did not go about the process with great subtlety. Having decided to approach Mary Bellenden, one of Caroline’s Maids of Honour – ‘incontestably the most agreeable, the most insinuating, and the most likeable woman of her time’ – George favoured the direct method. Knowing that she could not pay her bills, he sat beside her one night and ‘took out his purse and counted his money. He repeated the numeration; the giddy Bellenden lost her patience, and cried out, “Sir, I cannot bear it! If you count your money any more, I will go out of the room.”’15 In the end Mary Bellenden’s poverty conquered her irritation; but the time she spent as George’s mistress turned out to be unrewarding in every way. He was too mean to make her relationship financially rewarding, too disengaged to give her any real pleasure, and unwilling to award her the status of Principal Mistress. As soon as she could, Mary Bellenden found a husband to marry, and exchanged the role of unhappy royal mistress for that of respectable wife.

She was succeeded in the post by Lady Suffolk, whom George and Caroline had known since the early days of their marriage in Hanover. She had been Mrs Howard then, and had arrived at their court accompanied by a violent and drunken husband, and so poor that she had been forced to sell her own hair to raise money. She was beautiful, elegant, cultivated and entertaining (as an elderly woman, grand and formidable, she was one of Horace Walpole’s most valued friends). For over a decade she was George’s principal mistress. She was also one of the queen’s bedchamber women, which meant that wife and mistress spent a great deal of time in each other’s company, an experience neither of them enjoyed.

The difficulties of the situation would have been exacerbated by George’s indifference to the established rules of polite behaviour. He conducted his affair without the slightest attempt at discretion. With the methodical exactitude that characterised everything he did, he made his way to Lady Suffolk’s apartment at seven every evening, in full view of the court. If he found he was too early, he would pace about, looking at his watch, until it was exactly the right time for their assignation to begin. Perhaps it was some consolation to Caroline that this hardly suggested a relationship driven by great passion. Hervey thought the king kept it up ‘as a necessary appurtenance to his grandeur as a prince rather than an addition to his pleasure as a man’. He added that there were many at court who doubted whether the couple had a sexual relationship at all.16 Whatever the nature of the affair, it certainly did not seem to cool George’s ardour for his wife; and the much-tried Lady Suffolk often found herself caught in the crossfire of his angry attraction for Caroline. ‘It happened more than once,’ reported Walpole, ‘that the king, coming in to the room while the queen was dressing, has snatched off the handkerchief, and turning rudely to Mrs Howard, has cried, “Because you have an ugly neck yourself, you seek to hide the queen’s!”’17

Hervey thought that for all the offence Lady Suffolk’s presence gave to the queen’s dignity, Caroline had, with some effort, resigned herself to her rival’s existence. ‘Knowing the vanity of her husband’s temper, and that he must have some woman for the world to believe he lay with, she wisely suffered one to remain in that situation whom she despised, and had got the better of, for fear of making room for a successor whom he might really love, and who might get the better of her.’18 Certainly, when, in 1734, the king finally tired of his now middle-aged mistress, and Lady Suffolk sought to avoid the inevitable by quitting the court before she was asked to leave, it was Caroline who tried to persuade her to stay. In a lengthy private interview she urged her ‘to take a week to consider of the business. And give me your word that you will not read any romances in that time.’19 Lady Suffolk was not to be won over. She had had enough of her half-affair with a man she suspected had only ever wanted her as a mistress in order to demonstrate his independence from his wife. The king, who complained to Caroline that he could not understand ‘why you will not let me part with an old deaf woman, of whom I am weary’, was pleased to see her go.

Although Caroline’s daughters were similarly glad to see Lady Suffolk – whom they all hated – disappear from their own and their mother’s lives, it was their father towards whom they felt the most animus, despising him for his humiliating treatment of the queen. Anne, the cleverest and most outspoken of the sisters, made it the basis of a lasting and deeply felt dislike of the king, on which she would often expatiate to Hervey, venting her disdain in a resounding, freeform litany of the many things that she hated about him. ‘His passion, his pride, his vanity, his giving himself airs about women, the impossibility of being easy with him, his affectation of heroism, his unreasonable, simple, uncertain, disagreeable and often shocking behaviour to the queen, the difficulty of entertaining him, his insisting upon other people’s conversation who were to entertain him being always new and his own always the same thing over and over again …’20 The depth of her contempt for George made her hope he would not stay too long without a mistress. ‘I wish with all my heart he would take somebody else,’ she told Hervey, ‘that Mama might be a little relieved from the ennui of seeing him forever in her room.’21 This was to happen sooner than Anne can have imagined, and with consequences for her mother that she would never have wished for.

Among George II’s most jealously guarded pleasures were the regular visits he made back to his electorate – trips he called his Hanover-reisen. Caroline did not go with him, staying instead in Britain as his regent; she never saw Germany again after leaving in 1714. While at Herrenhausen in 1735, George met Amalie von Wallmoden, a young, fashionable married woman. He fell in love with her at first sight, with an immediacy and intensity that resembled his first meeting with Caroline some thirty years earlier. It was soon clear to everyone that his passion for ‘the Wallmoden’ was of an entirely different order to anything he had felt for previous lovers. He was soon in the grip of a powerful obsession for her that dominated all his thoughts.

Caroline knew this better than anyone else, because George wrote to tell her all about it. Whenever he was away, George wrote constantly to his wife, with letters ‘of sometimes sixty pages, and never less than forty, filled with an hourly account of everything he saw, heard thought or did’. Hervey thought this correspondence ‘crammed with minute trifling circumstances unworthy of a man to write, but even more of a woman to read’.22 George would sometimes instruct Caroline to show relevant passages ‘to the fat man’, which meant that the portly politician Robert Walpole saw for himself a great deal of what passed between the couple. He knew, as a result, that there was virtually nothing the king did not tell the queen, including all the most intimate details of his love affairs. Their correspondence also revealed that George required far more from Caroline than a dignified complaisance in the face of his infidelities; he also expected her to assist him in the pursuit of promising new affairs. ‘There was one letter,’ Walpole told Hervey, ‘in which he desired the queen to contrive, if she could, that the prince of Modena, who was to come at the latter end of the year to England, might bring his wife with him; and the reason he gave, was that he had heard her highness was pretty free with her person.’ It therefore came as no surprise to the queen to now receive ‘so minute a description’ of her husband’s new mistress, ‘that had the queen been a painter she might have drawn her rival’s picture at 600 miles distance’.23

At first, Caroline attempted to dismiss George’s new affair as she had done those that preceded it, but when he lingered on in Hanover, she began to grow increasingly concerned. And when at last he arrived reluctantly back in London, summoned home by his anxious ministers, she realised just how serious the situation had become, and to what degree her carefully managed primacy in his eyes was now threatened by his mistress in Germany.

Caroline might have imagined that she had already experienced most of what a royal marriage could require from a royal wife, but the humiliations, both public and private, she was now to endure at her husband’s hands were beyond anything she had yet encountered. George had always treated her brusquely in public. Hervey thought he was ‘perpetually so harsh and rough, that she could never speak one word uncontradicted, nor do any act unreproved’.24 Caroline’s response was to retreat into a posture of even greater submission, but her abnegation served only to spur George into even greater irritation. However innocuous the subject of conversation, the king would direct it into an attack on his wife. When Hervey and Caroline tried to draw him into a discussion on whether it was right to tip servants when one visited the houses of friends, that too turned into a rant, with the king declaring that the queen should not be venturing beyond her home in pursuit of pleasure. His whole family came under the lash of his ill humour. A few days later, he ‘snubbed the queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the princess Emily [as Amelia was informally known] for not hearing him, the princess Caroline for being grown fat, the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly, Lord Hervey for not knowing what relation the Prince of Sultzbach was to the elector Palatine, then carried the queen to walk, and be re-snubbed, in the garden’. On the rare occasions when the king’s mood lightened, ‘it was only to relate the scenes of his happy loves when he was at Hanover’.25 George had brought over from Germany a series of paintings that depicted ‘all his amorous amusements’ with Mme de Wallmoden, which he had framed and placed in the queen’s dressing room. In the evenings, before an embarrassed Hervey and a ‘peevish’ Caroline, ‘he would take a candle in his own royal hand, and tell … the story of these pictures’. To distract the queen, Hervey would ‘make grimaces’ over the king’s shoulder; but his jokes did little to rouse her spirits. George did not understand why his wife could not enter his amours with the same enthusiasm he did. ‘You must love the Wallmoden,’ he once instructed her, ‘for she loves me.’

When the king returned to Hanover the following year, it looked to an apprehensive Hervey as though Caroline had finally had enough and, provoked beyond endurance, intended to adopt a less conciliatory policy towards her husband. She began to write to him less regularly, and her letters, which had previously run to thirty pages or more, now barely exceeded seven or eight. When news reached England that Mme de Wallmoden had given birth to a son, Hervey feared that Caroline might lose control of her husband altogether. He ‘begged Sir Robert Walpole to do something or other to prevent her going on in a way that would destroy her’. Walpole thought ‘that nothing could ever quite destroy her power with the king’; but he was merciless in the advice he subsequently dispensed to a tearful Caroline: she must abandon any attempt to express her displeasure, or declare her own injured feelings. ‘It was too late in her life to try new methods, and she was never to hope now to keep her power with the king by reversing those methods by which she had gained it.’ She must conquer her bitterness and replace indignation with submission. ‘Nothing but soothing, complying, softening, bending, and submitting could do any good.’ And he added a final directive to his comprehensive recipe of humiliation: ‘She must press the king to bring this woman to England. He taught her this hard lesson till she wept.’26

The strategist in Caroline could see the benefits of having George back in Britain again, where he would be susceptible to her influence; but the aggrieved, betrayed wife in her resisted. The struggle between the two warring dimensions of Caroline’s character was short and sharp, and it was the queen and the politician who emerged victorious. Caroline wrote ‘a most submissive and tender letter’ to George ‘assuring him she had nothing but his interest and his pleasure at heart’ and making ‘an earnest request that he would bring Mme de Wallmoden to England, giving assurances that his wife’s conduct to his mistress should be everything he desired’.27 As Robert Walpole had predicted, once Caroline had declared her utter surrender to his will, George’s hostility began to melt away. He replied immediately with a host of conciliatory expressions. ‘You know my passions, my dear Caroline. You understand my frailties. There is nothing hidden in my heart from you.’ Robert Walpole, who was shown the letter, told Hervey that ‘it was so well written, that if the king was only to write to women and never to strut or talk to them, he believed His Majesty would get the better of all the men in the world with them’.28

When the king at last returned to London, ‘the warmest of all his rays were directed at the queen. He said no man ever had so affectionate and meritorious a wife or so faithful an able a friend.’ Mme de Wallmoden ‘seemed to those who knew the king best to be quite forgot’.29 Aged over fifty, Caroline had managed to seduce her straying husband home again. That was undoubtedly a triumph of sorts, but she could not have been unaware of the high price she had paid – and indeed, had always paid – for the maintenance of their precarious marital status quo. There were many things she knew her husband admired about her: her energy; her beauty, even; could he but admit it, the intellect that she had so tirelessly directed towards the success of their partnership – but none of this mattered as much to George as her willingness to deny all her best qualities in an absolute emotional submission to his will. He knew that with a glance or a frown, and above all with the threat of departure, he could bring her to heel; in the private heartland of their marriage, true power resided firmly where it had always been – in his hands.

It is true that Caroline had very few options in responding to George’s behaviour, as she had no desire to follow her mother-in-law into the post-marital wilderness; but her desire to keep the affections of her errant husband was more than simply the product of pragmatic considerations. She was genuinely distressed by his temporary abandonment of her, and was delighted when he came back. She was proud that the king had returned not only to court, but also to her bed, joyfully informing Robert Walpole of the fact so that he could appreciate the completeness of her victory. George was a difficult man to love, and he tried the fortitude of his wife severely in the thirty years they spent together. Yet during all that time, he remained the dominating figure in her life, crowding out all competing emotional claims. When forced by her father-in-law to make the appalling choice between her husband and her daughters, Caroline had unhesitatingly chosen George, declaring ‘her children were not a grain of sand compared to him’.30 It was not that she did not care for her girls; she loved her daughters deeply, but it was her relationship with her husband that occupied all her time and absorbed all her emotional energy. There was not much room left for anyone else.

*

If the relationship between George and Caroline was complex, and not conducive to happiness, it was as nothing compared to the misery that resulted from their dealings with Frederick, their eldest son. Some of the problems they encountered were not entirely of their own making; the operation of eighteenth-century politics inevitably placed the heir to the throne in opposition to his father. On reaching maturity he soon became the focus around which disgruntled politicians gathered, eager to stake their claim to the future. He could make a great deal of trouble for the king and his ministers if he was disposed to do so, and very few heirs found themselves able to resist that temptation. All this George and Caroline knew very well from their own difficult days as Prince and Princess of Wales; once they inherited the crown, however, they expunged all recollection of that period from their joint memory, and expected their son to behave with a political rectitude that had not characterised their own behaviour when they occupied his position. But their attitude to the prince went far beyond the discontents and difficulties that came with their constitutional roles. They treated Frederick with a venom that exceeded any legitimate political frustration, and conceived a hatred for him that became almost pathological in its intensity.

As with so much Hanoverian unhappiness, its origins lay in the actions of George I. He had kept his small grandson in Hanover, forbidding his parents to visit him there, and allowing them no say in his education and upbringing. When Frederick was sixteen, George I had begun to negotiate a marriage between his grandson and the Princess of Prussia. In a gesture of deliberate and insulting exclusion, the boy’s father was not consulted, nor even informed of the project. Back in England, the younger George watched the king load on to Frederick a host of honours and titles which had never been extended to him, and began to wonder whether it would be Frederick and not himself who would eventually inherit the electorate. None of these slights made him look fondly on his absent son. As the Duchess of Orléans astutely commented, it seemed to guarantee that the filial hatred that had defined one generation would be passed on to the next: ‘The young prince in Hanover may not meet with much love, for if the Prince of Wales has to bear his mother’s sins, perhaps he may have to answer for the grandfather’s.’31

In the years the young prince had been separated from his family, distance had not made his father’s heart grow fonder. Frederick grew up a remote cipher, a blank page on which George could project all the anger he felt against his own father, with whom the boy was forever damagingly identified. He did not know him, and felt nothing for him but the suspicion he instinctively reached for when faced with a rival of unknown and possibly damaging intent. He showed no desire at all to bring the young man back into his life. When he succeeded to the throne, it had been widely expected that Frederick would immediately be summoned to attend the coronation; but it took a parliamentary address to persuade the new king to do so.

After a long and hazardous journey through the winter landscapes of north Germany, the young prince finally arrived in England in December 1727. He was greeted with scant ceremony and a very cool welcome. When he reached London, there were no officials to greet him and no royal coach to transport him to St James’s Palace; he was obliged to hire a hackney coach and make his own way to his mother’s apartments.32 At first, he and his estranged family seem to have managed their new and somewhat uncomfortable proximity with some success. Frederick spent time with his mother, in private and in public, and played his part well at formal events such as the celebrations for the queen’s birthday. The king was satisfied too, but for rather different reasons. In his early encounters, he had found the inoffensive reality of his son far less intimidating than the threatening image he had conjured up in the boy’s absence. ‘He was quite pleased with him, as a new thing, felt him quite in his power.’ He was said to have told Robert Walpole, with a tellingly contemptuous air: ‘I think this is a son I need not be much afraid of.’33

Whilst he took pains to behave well under the scrutinising eyes of his parents, the twenty-one-year-old Frederick was keen to take advantage of the opportunities London offered, in characteristically Hanoverian style. He had left behind him in Germany an established mistress, Mme d’Elitz, who was said to have served both his father and his grandfather as lovers before him; now he turned his attentions further afield. He began affairs with an opera singer, with the daughter of an apothecary, and with a woman who played the hautboy. One night, venturing into St James’s Park in search of female company, he met a girl who robbed him of his wallet, twenty-two guineas and his royal seal; he was forced to advertise for the seal’s return, promising that no questions would be asked of whoever brought it back to him. In all these encounters he retained a combination of adolescent innocence and boastfulness, qualities he was not to lose until well beyond his first youth. ‘He was not over nice in his choice,’ commented Lord Egmont, who became a close friend, ‘and talks more of his feats in this way than he acts.’34 He was rowdy and boisterous at times; with a group of other rich young men, he would race through the night-time streets, breaking the windows of respectable householders. The eccentric Duchess of Buckingham was said to have fired grapeshot at him when her glass was broken. She placed an advertisement in the Daily Gazette, ‘to assure those who offered insults of this kind to her or her house that they should be received suitably to their conduct, and not to their rank’.35 For the rest of his life Frederick never lost his taste for somewhat crude practical jokes and pranks; a strategically placed bucket of water emptied on the head of an unsuspecting friend would always raise a laugh from him.

In later years, when their hostility to their son was firmly established, George and Caroline were keen to suggest that his behaviour had been wicked and untrustworthy from his very earliest days. Caroline once confided to Robert Walpole, with tears in her eyes, the opinion of Frederick’s old tutor in Hanover, whom she said had told her that her son had ‘the most vicious nature and false heart that ever man had, nor are his vices those of a gentleman but the mean, base tricks of a knavish footman’.36 But while Frederick was hardly a paragon of goodness, there is little to suggest that he committed sins any worse than those common to young men of his age and situation. Others who met him did not share his tutor’s apocalyptically bleak judgement. The intrepid traveller Lady Mary Worley Montagu had been introduced to him when he was a child in Hanover and found ‘something so very engaging and easy in his behaviour that he needs no advantage of rank to appear impressed’.37 A decade later, Lady Bristol, Lord Hervey’s mother, met the prince during his first weeks in London, and had been equally impressed. He was, she thought, ‘the most agreeable young man that it is possible to imagine, without being the least handsome, his person very little, but very well made and genteel, a liveliness in his eyes that is indescribable, and the most obliging address that can be conceived’.38

From the moment Hervey himself arrived back in England from a Grand Tour of Italy in 1729, he laid siege to the prince, doing all he could to win his affection. Frederick fell as quickly under Hervey’s spell as his mother was later to do. A few years older than the prince, Hervey was all the things the rather gauche young man was not – well travelled, assured, articulate, sophisticated, naturally at home in the elegant world. By the time Hervey’s third son was born in 1730, the two men were such close friends that, with the prince’s blessing, Hervey named the boy after him. They were seen everywhere together and supported each other through a variety of tribulations. When Hervey, whose health was always troublesome, collapsed ‘as if I had been shot’ in a fit at the prince’s feet, Frederick abandoned all other commitments to stay with his friend until he recovered. ‘The prince sat with me all day yesterday,’ Hervey wrote with satisfaction, ‘and has promised to do so again today.’39 Hervey returned the favour when Frederick in his turn fell ill. After he recovered, he presented Hervey with a gold snuffbox bearing his portrait and invited him down to his country retreat at Kew, where they played at ninepins all day. They were now so close that they had dropped any formal titles; the prince wrote to Hervey in playful tones as ‘my dear chicken’ or ‘my lord chicken’.40

By the summer of 1731, the relationship between Hervey and Frederick had become so intimate and so affectionate that Hervey’s established lover began to grow uneasy about it. Stephen Fox – known to his friends as Ste – was the brother of the politician Henry Fox and the uncle of the famous Charles. He and Hervey had been involved in a passionate affair for nearly five years, even though Ste shared few of Hervey’s interests. Where Hervey was happiest in the intrigue and incident of the city, Ste was a dedicated countryman, who could rarely be persuaded to leave his Somerset estate. Hervey’s wife Molly, who knew all about their relationship, said that ‘unless one could be metamorphosed into a bird or a hare, [Ste] will have nothing to say to one’.41 When they were apart, Hervey wrote constantly to Ste, doing all he could to convey his love for him in words. ‘I hear you in the deadliest silence and see you in the deepest darkness,’ he assured him. ‘For my own part, my mind never goes naked but in your territories.’42 Now Ste began to wonder whether the prince was edging him out of Hervey’s affections. When Hervey unguardedly told Ste how much he cared for the prince, Ste exploded in an outburst of jealousy and recrimination. Shocked by Ste’s response, Hervey did all he could to mollify his wounded feelings. ‘When I said I loved 7 [his codeword for the prince] as much as I loved you, I lied egregiously; I am as incapable of wishing to love anybody else so well as I am of wishing to love you less.’43 He insisted that Ste would always be his only real love, assuring him ‘that since first I knew you I have been yours without repenting, and still am, and ever shall be undividedly, and indissolubly yours’. Eventually, the storm passed.

While it is hard to know how conscious Frederick was of the effect he had on Hervey, it is difficult to imagine that he had no understanding of the emotions he had stirred up. When Hervey wrote to Frederick describing himself as Hephaistion, every educated man of the time would have known that Hephaistion was the male lover of a great prince, Alexander the Great. It is also perhaps significant that the pages which cover the period of greatest intimacy between Hervey and Frederick were removed and destroyed by Hervey’s grandson when he inherited Hervey’s memoirs. Considering the graphic and unflinching nature of what he left untouched, the excised section must have contained details he regarded as even more scandalous than what remains.

In the end, it was a row over a woman, not a man, that put an end to Frederick and Hervey’s friendship. None of the three men involved in the complicated triangle that played itself out in 1731–32 saw their relationship with each other as debarring them from affairs with women. All three married, and between them they produced a tribe of children. Down in Somerset, Ste preferred hunting and shooting to the active pursuit of women; neither Frederick nor Hervey saw any reason to interrupt their more conventional predatory habits. ‘What game you poach, sir,’ Hervey wrote archly to the prince, ‘what you hunt, what you catch, or what runs into your mouth, I don’t pretend to guess.’44 But when he discovered that Frederick had successfully seduced a woman he regarded as a conquest of his own, Hervey was incensed.

Anne Vane, one of Queen Caroline’s Maids of Honour, had been Hervey’s mistress since 1730. She was not considered much of a prize. ‘She is a fat and ill-shaped dwarf,’ said one uncharitable witness, ‘who has nothing good to recommend her that I know.’45 It was hardly a passionate affair; Hervey described her to Ste as ‘a little ragout that, though it is not one’s favourite dish, will prevent one either dying of hunger or choosing to fast’.46 Yet when he discovered that the prince had set her up in a house in Soho he was furious. It was not a thwarted sense of possessiveness on Hervey’s part. Anne Vane had so many lovers that when she became pregnant, three men claimed paternity of the baby, though it was the prince who was widely considered best entitled to that credit. Hervey was more hurt by what he considered the prince’s betrayal than Anne Vane’s faithlessness. When Frederick began to spend more and more time with Anne and less and less with his old friend, Hervey’s anger turned to desperation. In a last-ditch attempt to win back the favour that was so visibly ebbing away, he wrote a blistering letter to his ex-mistress, threatening to tell the prince everything he knew about her unless she promised to help reinstate him in Frederick’s good books. Anne collapsed with shock, and on her recovery, showed the letter to Frederick, who was extremely angry and never forgave Hervey. The breach between the two men was immediate and irrevocable; their years of friendship were swept away and replaced by volleys of insult and invective, claim and counterclaim, professions of outraged honour and betrayed loyalty. In the summer of 1732, Anne gave birth to a son, who was ostentatiously named Fitzfrederick. Frederick installed her in a palatial house in Grosvenor Square and gave her an annual allowance of £3,000.47 It was a very public demonstration of the transfer of his affections.

Reluctantly accepting that he had no real future with the son, Hervey now concentrated his attention on Frederick’s mother, who responded eagerly to his overtures. When the prince protested that ‘it was extremely hard a man the whole world knew had been so impertinent to him, and whom he never spoke to, should be picked out by the queen for her constant companion’, his complaints were ignored. Hervey later maintained that despite their quarrel, he would sometimes take Frederick’s side, arguing his case before the prince’s increasingly ill-disposed parents. He was candid enough to admit that he did this not as ‘an affectation of false generosity but merely from prudence and regard to himself’. He knew, he said, how common it was in families ‘for suspended affection to revive itself’ and did not want to find himself excoriated by both sides of a reunited dynasty.48 But as relations between the prince and his parents grew more bitter, Hervey took full advantage of the opportunities offered by his position around the queen to take revenge upon his erstwhile friend. He became one of the prince’s greatest enemies in a household in which there was considerable competition for that title, egging Caroline on to ever greater and more shocking declarations of anger and disgust with Frederick.

In the end he supplanted the prince in every aspect of his mother’s affection. As Caroline knew, Hervey disliked his own mother, whom he thought a loud and silly woman. ‘Your mother,’ she once told him, ‘is a brute that deserves just such a beast as my son. I hope I do not; and I wish with all my soul we could change, that they who are alike might go together, and that you and I might belong to one another.’49 Hervey, who did all he could to present himself to Caroline as the child she truly deserved, once ventured to suggest the possibility directly. ‘Supposing I had had the honour to be born Your Majesty’s son –’ ‘I wish to God you had,’ interrupted the queen. Few conversations could have given him such a sense of deep and vengeful satisfaction.

*

In later years, there was a great deal of speculation about what had provoked the hatred that came to define the relations between the king and queen and their eldest son. Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor from 1737 to 1756, hinted at the existence of ‘certain passages between him and the king’ that he said were ‘of too high and secret a nature’ ever to be placed in writing. But for all the desire to find a single compelling explanation for their behaviour, there was in fact no one decisive event which produced the rapid decline in even nominal goodwill between George, Caroline and Frederick.

Instead, it was a number of considerations that exacerbated an already unhappy situation. The family history of suspicion, betrayal and distrust weighed heavily upon Frederick’s parents. There were few examples in their own past of disinterested, affectionate conduct or calm self-effacement to guide or inspire them. George’s temper was irritable and easily provoked, especially by those he thought should be unquestioningly subordinate to his will. These private discontents were magnified by a political culture which anticipated and indeed positively rewarded a separation of interests between the king and his heir. Once embarked upon, it was all but impossible to prevent these public breaches from taking on a very personal dimension. ‘It ran a little in the blood of the family to hate the eldest son,’ summarised Horace Walpole, with succinct understatement.50 But as Walpole also understood, there was a more immediate trigger for the king’s first eruption of fury at his son, and that issue was money.

When Frederick came of age, George II allowed him around £40,000 per annum from the Civil List. Frederick considered this inadequate, especially when compared to the £100,000 his father had received when he was Prince of Wales. Even Hervey had some sympathy with Frederick’s position. He pointed out to Caroline that ‘the best friends to her, the king and the administration were of the opinion that the prince had not enough money allowed him, and whilst he was so straitened in his circumstances, it was impossible he should ever be quiet’.51 Hervey hoped that the queen would work her magic upon her husband and persuade him to adopt a more generous stance. Caroline was, at this point, better disposed towards Frederick than her husband, preferring to think of him as badly advised rather than malicious in intent. ‘Poor creature,’ she told Hervey, ‘with not a bad heart, he is induced by knaves and fools to blow him up to do things that are as unlike an honest man as a wise one.’52 Caroline insisted that she had often interceded on his behalf with his father, assuring Frederick that ‘she wanted nothing so much as their being well together.’ She had, she declared, ‘sunk several circumstances the king had not seen and softened things that he had’ in order to present her son in the best possible light. She did this even though she saw no signs that Frederick appreciated her efforts. When Hervey told her that ‘it always had been his opinion, and still was so, that the prince loved Her Majesty in his heart’, she was sceptical. She agreed that ‘he has no inveterate hatred to me, but for love, I cannot say I see any great signs of it’.53

The king’s response was both more straightforward and more hostile. He had no sympathy with his son’s demands. Frederick had already run up huge debts in Hanover which he had no prospect of repaying without his father’s help. George also argued that the larger allowance he had received as Prince of Wales had been required to support a growing family, whilst his son was responsible for no one but himself. Frederick’s persistence in pursuing a comparable sum confirmed all his father’s early apprehensions about the ambition and opportunism of his heir; he suspected the cash was intended to further Frederick’s political ends, financing an opposition that would inevitably be directed against him. Soon the king refused to speak to his son at all. ‘He hated to talk of him almost as much as to talk to him,’ observed Hervey; but he made his feelings known by ‘laying it on him pretty thick’ in more oblique references. ‘One very often sees a father a very brave man, and the son a scoundrel,’ the king once declared to a group of embarrassed listeners, ‘a father very honest and his son a great knave; the father a man of truth and the son a great liar; in short, a father that has all sorts of good qualities and a son that is good for nothing.’ Hervey noticed that the king stopped short, ‘feeling that he had pushed it too far’, and noted that in some cases ‘it was just the reverse, and that very disagreeable fathers sometimes had very agreeable men for their sons. I suppose,’ remarked Hervey, ‘that in this case he thought of his own father.’54

George’s behaviour helped to usher in precisely the situation he had feared: soon, the prince stood at the centre of an organised coalition of ambitious politicians keen to use his grievances as a means of attacking his father’s administration. Far from being a token figurehead, the prince was an active participant in the development of an opposition strategy, doing all he could to attract supporters to his cause. He was successful in luring some of the brightest talents of the rising generation into his orbit; recognising that time was on his side, he did all he could to win over the young. His friend and adviser Lord Egmont said he had even tried to attract into his camp the headmaster of Westminster School, as it was considered such a breeding ground for the politicians of the future.

Slowly, the prince began to feel his potential strength. When Robert Walpole’s government found itself unable to carry the controversial Excise Bill through Parliament in 1737, Frederick declined to come to his father’s assistance by ordering his supporters to vote with the ministers. It was his first public clash with the king. Walpole, alarmed at the precedent it set for the future, tried to coax him towards more dutiful behaviour by offering to raise the vexed issue of his allowance with Parliament. But Frederick was not interested; he was not to be bought off with promises, and was prepared to wait for a better opportunity to emerge.

The king did not react well to his son’s defiance. For some time he had not spoken to Frederick. Now, when forced into his company, he could not be brought to make the smallest acknowledgement of his presence. ‘Whenever the prince was in a room with the king,’ observed Hervey, ‘it put one in mind of stories one has heard of ghosts that appear to part of the company and are invisible to the rest; and in this manner, wherever the prince stood, though the king passed ever so near, it always seemed as if the king thought the place the prince filled a void space.’55 George later told Hervey that he had once asked Caroline whether she thought ‘the beast was his son’. He did not mean to impugn her fidelity; drawing perhaps on the same vision of the world that fuelled his belief in vampires, he explained that he thought Frederick might be what the Germans called ‘a Wechselbalg’ – a changeling.56

George’s exasperation was increased by the apparent indifference with which his son appeared to receive the snubs and insults meted out to him. While his father fumed at St James’s, Frederick turned with annoyingly blithe unconcern to his own pleasures. He was a skilled cricketer, captaining the Surrey team and – to Hervey’s fastidious disgust – regularly playing alongside gardeners and grooms. He shared with most of his family a passionate love of music, although, unlike his father, he liked to perform as well as listen. He was an accomplished cellist and in 1734 gave impromptu concerts once or twice a week at Kensington Palace for anyone who turned up to enjoy them – including, noted a horrified Hervey (who compared Frederick to Nero playing his fiddle), ‘all the underling servants and rabble of the palace’.57 Like his mother, he loved books and read widely in subjects ranging from politics to philosophy to theology. Like her too, he relished an argument and was a sharp and nimble debater. Frederick even dabbled in writing himself. When he and Hervey were still friends, they had produced an undistinguished drama, The Modish Couple, which lasted only a few nights when performed on stage, and had closed amidst protests from a furious audience demanding their money back.

In 1734, the prince approached the king and asked permission to marry. George refused at first, citing Frederick’s ‘childish and silly’ behaviour as his justification; he vetoed a plan for the prince to reopen negotiations for the Princess of Prussia, famously remarking that he did not think grafting a coxcomb on to a halfwit would improve the breed. But on returning from one of his regular trips to Hanover in 1736, George announced that during his visit, he had seen the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, and thought she would make a suitable wife for his son. The prince answered ‘with great duty, decency and propriety, that whatever his majesty thought a proper match for his son would be acceptable to him’. In the midst of his affair with Mme de Wallmoden, the king was keen to return to Hanover as soon as possible, and demanded that the match take place immediately.

A few months later, Augusta arrived in London. She was seventeen years old, gawky, naive and alone: she ‘suffered to bring nobody but a single man with her’. Hervey observed she was ‘rather tall and had health and youth enough in her face, joined to a very modest and good-natured look, to make her countenance not disagreeable’; but his practised seducer’s eye found ‘her arms long, and her motions awkward, and in spite of all her finery of jewels and brocade’ she had ‘an ordinary air which trappings could not cover or exalt’.58 She spoke not a word of English; her mother explained that it had not been thought necessary to teach her, believing that ‘the Hanover family having been above twenty years on the throne, to be sure most people in England must now speak German’.59

Nervous and inexperienced as she was, Augusta made a good beginning by prostrating herself on the floor in front of the king, who found this extreme form of respect entirely to his liking. She summoned enough courage to support herself through the rigours of the marriage ceremony, and she endured the jocular formality of a public wedding night with a man she had never met before with phlegmatic resignation. The young couple were led to their chamber and undressed with great ceremony. Once they were established in bed, the court processed past them, offering congratulations and ribald remarks about what was to come next. The prince was observed to eat glass after glass of jelly, which was thought to be an aphrodisiac; ‘every time he took one’, Hervey noted disdainfully, ‘turning about and laughing and winking at some of his servants’. He also wore a nightcap ‘some inches higher than any grenadiers cap in the whole army’. The next morning, the queen gossiped away to Hervey ‘with her usual enjoyment, on the glasses of jelly and the nightcap’, saying that one had made her sick and the other had made her laugh. They both thought Augusta looked so refreshed that ‘they concluded she had slept very sound’.60

The prince’s marriage marked a new phase in the deterioration of relationships within the royal family, and brought out into the open the covert warfare that had been waged between parents and son for so many years. Now Frederick felt himself strong enough to go on the offensive, and did so through the medium of his naive young wife. Whenever the couple attended chapel, the prince ensured that they always arrived after the king and queen. To reach her seat, Augusta had to push past Caroline and oblige her to get up. It took a direct order from the king to put a stop to this petty campaign of attrition. Caroline did not blame her new daughter-in-law, saying that she knew she ‘did nothing without the prince’s order’. There was no harm in Augusta, Caroline assured Hervey: ‘she never meant to offend, was very modest and very respectful’, but it was ‘her want of understanding’ that made her such exhausting company. She was perhaps not surprised to hear from one of her daughters that Augusta spent a large part of each day ‘playing with a great jointed baby’, dressing and undressing it in full view of an incredulous crowd of servants, who, like the queen, thought a married woman should be beyond playing with dolls.

When the prince announced that his wife was pregnant, Caroline simply refused to believe it. She had for some time harboured doubts about her son’s capacity to sire a child; now her curiosity developed into a strange, fixed obsession. She insisted to Hervey that she did not believe the marriage had ever been consummated, and questioned him remorselessly to discover what he knew about Frederick’s sexual prowess. It was a subject she had already discussed directly with her son, who, she told Hervey, ‘sometimes spoke of himself in these matters as if he were Hercules, and at other times as if he were four-score’. Frederick had recently confided in her details ‘of an operation that he had had performed upon him by his surgeon’, and added that he had ‘got nasty distempers by women’; but she suspected both were lies intended to distract attention from the reality of his impotence. She was sure little Fitzfrederick, the prince’s alleged child by Anne Vane, was really Hervey’s. Hervey replied that Fitzfrederick was not his child and that from what Anne Vane had told him, he assured Caroline there was no reason why he should not be Frederick’s. ‘She used to describe the prince in these matters as ignorant to a degree inconceivable, but not impotent.’61

Unconvinced, Caroline asked for a second opinion: could Hervey ‘get some intelligence’ from Lady Dudley, who ‘has slept with half the town’ and might know if Frederick ‘was like other men or not’? When Hervey refused to do so, the queen tried another approach. Had Frederick ever asked him to father a child on his behalf? Hervey told her he had not. If he had been asked, Caroline persisted, would such a thing be possible? Hervey thought it might be, but only if the marriage had actually been consummated, ‘for though I believe I may put one man upon her for another’, he doubted whether he could fool a woman who had never had a lover. Would it be possible to deceive her if both men were agreed to carry out the plan? It would take about a month, mused Hervey, during which ‘I would advise the prince to go to bed several hours after his wife, and to pretend to get up with a flux several times in the night, to perfume himself always with the same predominant smell, and by the help of these tricks, it would be very easy.’ It would be easier if the man was the same size as the husband and did not speak during the process. Caroline was so shocked by the ease with which Hervey thought the deception might be managed that she delivered a rare rebuke to him: ‘I love you mightily, my dear Lord Hervey, but if I thought you would get a little Hervey on the Princess of Saxe-Gotha … I could not bear it, nor do I know what I should be capable of doing.’62

Caroline seems to have convinced herself that her son was preparing some deception in relation to his wife’s pregnancy, whether at the point of conception or delivery. As the months went by, she questioned Augusta about her condition, but could get no sensible answers from her. To everything she asked – how long she had been pregnant, when she expected to give birth – the princess replied simply that she did not know. The prince had clearly instructed her to tell his mother nothing. But Caroline was determined the couple would not evade her scrutiny. She knew Frederick wanted the birth to take place at St James’s, rather than at Hampton Court where the family were currently in residence. Wherever it happened, Caroline was certain she would be there: ‘At her labour I positively will be … I will be sure it is her child.’63

She had reckoned without her son’s lunatic determination to outwit her. On 31 July 1736, the prince and princess dined formally with the king and queen at Hampton Court. Later that night, the princess’s labour began. Frederick immediately ordered a carriage to take his wife, himself, three of the princess’s ladies and Vreid, the man-midwife, to London, away from the prying eyes of his mother. Augusta’s waters broke as the prince carried her down the corridor. Ignoring the princess’s desperate pleas to be left where she was, Frederick bundled his labouring wife into the coach, all the time murmuring, ‘Courage, courage’ in her ear. It was quite the worst thing Frederick ever did in his life, and he was lucky that Augusta did not die as a result of his actions. ‘At about ten this cargo arrived in town,’ wrote Hervey. ‘Notwithstanding all the handkerchiefs that had been thrust up Her Royal Highness’s petticoats in the coach, her clothes were in such a state with the filthy inundations which attend these circumstances … that the prince ordered all the lights put out that people might not see … the nasty oracular evidence of his folly.’ There were no sheets in the unprepared house, so Augusta was finally delivered between two tablecloths. At nearly eleven o’clock, she gave birth to ‘a little rat of a girl, about the bigness of a large toothpick case’.64

After the birth the prince informed his parents, back at Hampton Court, what had happened. The queen could not believe it; the king was furious, shouting, ‘You see now, with all your wisdom how they have outwitted you! This is all your fault! A false child will be put upon you and how will you answer to your children!’65 Pausing only to dress and to pick up Lord Hervey, Caroline went immediately to London, where she spoke politely to the exhausted princess and kissed the tiny baby. She said nothing to Frederick, other than to observe that ‘it was a miracle the princess and the child had not been killed’.66 Then she turned around and returned to Hampton Court. She had no doubts, she told Hervey, that the ‘poor ugly little she-mouse’ she had seen at St James’s was indeed the princess’s child. Had it been ‘a brave, jolly boy I should not have been cured of my suspicions’. But her relief that there had been ‘no chairman’s brat’ wished on them did nothing to make the birth an event that brought the family together.

Frederick named his new daughter Augusta, pointedly failing to pay his mother the compliment of naming the first-born girl in her honour. But even without the ill feeling surrounding her arrival, there would have been no reconciliation between the generations. Some time before her birth, Frederick had decided to raise again the long-disputed issue of his allowance in Parliament, and against all expectations, he had been successful in making the subject a Commons motion. His father’s response to the prospect of having his financial affairs publicly (and no doubt critically) discussed was predictably apoplectic. Caroline’s reaction was more surprising. It had been plain for some time that her attitude to Frederick had hardened considerably. When Hervey asked her if her views on her son had indeed changed over the last year, Caroline agreed most vehemently that they had, telling him that she now believed ‘my dear firstborn is the greatest ass and the greatest liar and the greatest canaille and the greatest beast in the world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it’.67

Now Caroline exploded, releasing a pent-up torrent of reproach and resentment. ‘Her invectives against her son were of the incessant and of the strongest kind,’ wrote Hervey, who witnessed them at first hand. As the parliamentary vote drew nearer, and the prospect of the prince’s victory looked more likely, the queen’s rage grew increasingly intemperate. She and her unmarried daughter, Caroline, worked themselves up into ever more passionate denunciations of Frederick. ‘They neither of them made much ceremony of wishing a hundred times a day that the prince might drop down dead of an apoplexy, the queen cursing the hour of his birth, and the princess declaring she grudged him every hour he continued to breathe.’ The young Caroline, who was said to nurture a deep and unrequited passion for Lord Hervey, had quickly absorbed her parents’ hostility towards her eldest brother; she claimed always to have detested him, provoked by his duplicity, his selfishness and his demeaning and destructive pursuit of money. She told Hervey ‘that he was a nauseous beast (those were her words) who cared for nobody but his nauseous self’, adding that Hervey was a fool for ever having loved him. When the prince refused the political mediations of Robert Walpole, saying he was determined to pursue his claim, the queen declared her son was ‘the lowest, stinking coward in the world … I know if I was asleep, or if he could come behind me, he is capable of shooting me through the head, or stabbing me in the back’.68

On the day of the vote, even the usually unshockable Hervey was taken aback by the venom of the queen’s attack. As Frederick walked across a courtyard, Caroline watched him. ‘Reddening with rage, she said, “Look, there he goes – that wretch! – that villain! – I wish the ground would open this moment and sink that monster to the lowest reaches of hell.”’ Seeing Hervey’s startled face she added: ‘You stare at me; but I assure you that if my wishes and prayers had any effects; and the maledictions of a mother signified anything, his days would not be very happy or very long.’69 In the end, the prince lost the motion by the narrow margin of thirty votes; but it was too late now for anything to mend the gulf that divided him from the rest of his family.

There was a tragic echo of the past in what happened next. The king decided Frederick’s behaviour had been so provocative that he was to be expelled from the precincts of all the royal palaces. He instructed Hervey, in his role as Vice Chamberlain, to make the necessary arrangements. Hervey based his actions on the instructions that had been drawn up to manage the ejection of George and Caroline from the same palaces almost twenty years before. There was, however, one area in which the king did not intend to follow the harsh example of his father. ‘Sir Robert Walpole told Lord Hervey that the resolution was to leave the child with the princess, and not to take it (as the late king had taken the king’s children upon the quarrel in the last reign) lest any accident might happen to this little royal animal.’70 Hervey went about his task with gusto, and admitted that he ‘was not a little pleased with a commission that put it in his power to make use of the king’s power and authority to gratify and express his resentment against the prince’.71 But even he was surprised when the king expressly refused to allow Frederick and Augusta any ‘chests or other such things’ from the royal apartments. When Hervey said that surely he did not mean them to carry away their clothes in linen baskets, George retorted: ‘Why not? A basket is good enough for them.’72

On the day of the prince’s departure, Hervey joined the royal family as they sat round the breakfast table contemplating what was about to happen. ‘I am weary of the puppy’s name,’ declared the king. ‘I wish I was never to hear it again, but at least I shall not be plagued any more with seeing his nasty face.’ He told Caroline that he could forgive everything he had done to him, but could never forget the injury done to her. ‘I never loved the puppy well enough to have him ungrateful to me but to you he is a monster and the greatest villain ever born.’ Princess Caroline, elaborating on what was a familiarly obsessive theme, hoped her brother would burst so that they could mourn ‘with smiling faces and crepe and hoods for him’. The queen was adamant that she was unmoved by her son’s impending exile: ‘God knows in my heart, I feel no more for him than if he was no relation, and if I was to see him in hell, I should feel no more for him than I should for any rogue that was there.’ And yet, she added, ‘once I would have given up all my other children for him. I was fond of that monster, I looked on him as if he had been the happiness of my life, and now I wish that he had never been born … I hope in God I shall never see the monster’s face again.’73 She never did.

*

‘There was a strange affectation of incapacity of being sick that ran through the royal family,’ Hervey observed, ‘which they carried so far that no one of them was more willing to own any other of the family being ill than to acknowledge themselves to be.’ Hervey had seen the king ‘get out of his bed choking and with a sore throat and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levee’. He expected Caroline to do the same. ‘With all his fondness for the queen, he used to make her in the like circumstances commit the like extravagances.’74

Throughout the summer of 1737, Hervey noticed that Caroline was often unwell. On 9 November, whilst inspecting her newly completed library at St James’s Palace, she was taken seriously ill. ‘She called her complaint the colic, her stomach and bowels giving her great pain. She came home, took Daffy’s elixir, but … was in such pain and so uneasy with frequent retchings to vomit, that she went to bed.’ Like the dutiful warhorse she was, she forced herself to attend that day’s formal Drawing Room, but she admitted to Lord Hervey that she was not ‘able to entertain people’ and prepared to take her leave. Before she could do so, the king reminded her that she had not spoken to the Duchess of Norfolk. The queen ‘made her excuses’ to the duchess, ‘who was the last person she ever spoke to in public’, then retired to her room.75

Hervey, of course, went with her. He was, as he proudly recalled, ‘never out of the queen’s apartment for above four or five hours at most during her whole illness’. He loved Caroline as much as he loved anyone, except Ste; but he did not allow his affection to get in the way of his merciless reporter’s eye. The candid details of her suffering that fill his account of the queen’s long and painful death demonstrate how hard it was to die with dignity in the eighteenth century, and how little medicine could do, either to cure or to alleviate distress. It also illustrates very poignantly the strength of the complicated ties that had bound Caroline to her husband for so long, and the true depth of his feelings for her. He never showed her so clearly that he loved her as when she was dying; but even then, his passion was tempered by anger – an impotent frustration in the face of her weakness and suffering that was, in its own warped way, what it had always been – a furious demonstration of his need for her.

From the beginning of her sickness, George refused to leave his wife. He had his bedding brought into her room and laid it on the floor, so that he could be near her. Sometimes, ‘inconveniently to both himself and the queen’, he would ‘lay on the queen’s bed all night in his nightgown, where he could not sleep, nor she turn around’.76 He scolded her when pain made her shift about in bed. ‘How the devil should you sleep when you can never lie still a moment? … Nobody can sleep in that manner and that is always your way; you never take the proper method to get what you want and then you wonder that you have it not.’77 He begged her to eat, and although she could not hold anything in her stomach, she tried to take something to please him. When she brought it up, ‘he used peevishly to say, “How is it possible that you should not know whether you like a thing or not? If you do not like it, why do you call for it?”’ Once, in front of an appalled Hervey, he told her she looked like a calf whose throat had just been cut.

Hervey thought these ‘sudden sallies of temper’ were ‘unaccountable’. He did not understand that they were a product of George’s increasing desperation, for his anger mounted as his wife grew steadily worse. At first, no one knew exactly what was wrong. She would not allow any doctors to attend her and permitted no one to examine her. When they were alone, Hervey often heard her cry: ‘I have an ill which nobody knows of!’ He took that to mean ‘nothing more than she felt what she could not describe’.

Her husband knew better. As days went by, and Caroline ‘complained more than ever of the racking pains she felt in her belly’, George decided enough was enough. He whispered to her that ‘he was afraid her illness proceeded from a thing he had promised never to speak of to her again; but that her life being in danger’, he was obliged to tell everything he knew. Caroline ‘begged and entreated him with great earnestness that he would not’, but the king sent for Ranby the surgeon ‘and told him that the queen had a rupture at her navel, and bid him examine her’. It took Ranby only a few minutes to confirm the diagnosis. Caroline ‘made no answer but lay down and turned her head to the other side, and as the king told me, he thinks it was the only tear she shed while she was ill’.78

George told Hervey that he had first noticed the injury fourteen years before, after Caroline had given birth to their last child, Louisa. She told him ‘it was nothing more than what was common for almost every woman to have had after a hard labour’. When it did not improve, he had urged her to consult a doctor, but she refused and begged him to say no more about it. When he came back from his extended trip to Hanover in 1736, he thought it had become much worse. He told her he was certain it was a rupture. Caroline responded with uncharacteristic fury, ‘telling me it was no such thing, and that I fancied she had a nasty distemper, which she was sure she had not, and spoke more peevishly to me than she had ever done in her life’. The more he begged her to ‘let somebody see it’, the more determined she became to reveal it to no one. ‘I at last told her I wished she might not repent her obstinacy, but promised her I would never mention this subject to her again as long as I lived.’ These conversations took place at the height of the king’s passionate affair with Mme de Wallmoden, and even the determinedly unimaginative George suspected that his infidelity had coloured the way his words had been received by his hurt and resentful wife. ‘In as plain insinuations as he could,’ he told Hervey that Caroline believed it was because of her injury that he had ‘grown weary of her person’. Hervey was astonished that ‘an ill-timed coquetry at fifty-four that would hardly have been acceptable at twenty-five’ had been allowed to exacerbate the queen’s complaint; but he was forced to accept the truth of it. ‘Several things she afterwards said to the king in her illness … plainly demonstrated how strongly these apprehensions of making her person distasteful to the king had worked upon her.’79

Caroline suffered from an umbilical hernia, a condition in which internal pressure or congenital weakness forces part of the intestine through the stomach wall. As she told George, it can be caused by difficult labour, or through other side effects of pregnancy. Now it can be resolved by an operation usually simple enough to be performed as day surgery. In the eighteenth century, there was little that could be done. The doctors debated how best to proceed. One proposed ‘cutting a hole in her navel big enough to thrust the gut back into its place, which Ranby opposed, saying all the guts, on such an operation, would come out of the body, in a moment, on to the bed’. The wound had begun to mortify, and Caroline was subjected to a great deal of pointless agony as the doctors tried to cut away the infected areas around it. But they all knew there was nothing useful that could be done; and Ranby soon told George that the queen could not survive.

Caroline knew it too. She had declared from the beginning of her illness that she was dying. She summoned her family around her to take leave of them, and said goodbye to them one by one. ‘She took a ruby ring from her finger that the king had given her at her coronation and putting it on his said, “This is the last thing I have to give you – naked I came to you and naked I go from you.”’ As the king wept, she urged him to marry again, ‘upon which his sobs began to rise, and his tears to fall with double vehemence. Whilst in the midst of this passion, wiping his eyes and sobbing between every word, he got out the answer. “Non – j’aurai – des – maîtresses.” To which the queen made no other reply than “Mon Dieu! Cela n’empêche pas.”’80 In death, Caroline was as resigned as she had been in life to the curious mixture of passion and selfishness with which her husband had declared his devotion to her.

There was one conspicuous absentee from her deathbed farewells. As soon as he heard his mother was ill, Frederick asked permission to come and see her. George was incensed, telling Hervey that if the prince appeared at St James’s, ‘I order you to go to the scoundrel, and tell him I wonder at his impudence for daring to come here … Bid him go about his business, for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him now act his false, whining cringing tricks.’81 However, when the queen asked if there had been any messages from Frederick, the king relented. He would do anything to please his dying wife, even to the extent of admitting his hated son back into the house from which he had been so recently ejected. He told Caroline ‘that if she had the least mind to see her son, he had no objection to it, and begging her to do just what she liked’. Caroline was implacable. She told George she would not see him again, and that if she grew worse ‘and was weak enough to talk of seeing him, I beg, sir, that you will conclude that I dote and rave’. She did neither; Hervey reported that until the moment of her death she never spoke of the prince ‘but always with detestation’. She told the king and her daughter that ‘at least I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed – I shall never see that monster again’.

She finally died, after ten days of suffering, on 20 November. George ‘kissed the face and hands of the lifeless body several times’ and went silently to his apartments, which he did not leave for several weeks. He took Hervey with him, and ‘during this retirement … showed a tenderness of which the world thought him utterly incapable’. Everything he did and said, thought Hervey, proved how much he had loved and admired the woman he had lost. Hervey was amazed to hear the usually blunt and unsentimental king describe so feelingly what she had meant to him, ‘the tender manner in which he related a thousand old stories relating to his first seeing the queen, his marriage with her, the way in which they had lived at Hanover, his behaviour to her when she had had smallpox and his risking his life by getting it off her (which he did) rather than leave her’.82

He also recalled more recent times, ‘and repeated every day, her merits in every capacity with regard to him’. Unsurprisingly, he praised her complete submission to his will. ‘He firmly believed, she never, since he first knew her, ever thought of anything she was to do or say, but with the view of doing or saying it in what manner it would be most agreeable to his pleasure or serviceable to his interest.’ But he also acknowledged ‘that she had been of more use to him as a minister than any other body had ever been to him or any other prince’. It was an astute assessment of Caroline’s virtues in the public world; yet it was in her role as the lodestone of his private world that he knew he would miss her most. ‘She was the best wife, the best mother, the best companion, the best friend and the best woman that ever was born.’ He firmly believed that ‘he had never seen her out of humour in his life, though he had passed more hours with her than he believed any two other people in the world had ever passed together, and that he had never been tired in her company one minute’. He concluded with a compliment which Caroline would surely have understood was the highest accolade he could bestow on her: ‘He was sure that he could have been happy with no other woman upon earth for a wife, and that if she had not been his wife, he had rather had her for his mistress than any other woman he had ever been acquainted with.’83

George and Caroline’s had been an unconventional kind of marriage; but George could say, with some justification, that it had delivered for him an experience of happiness that had been so conspicuously denied to his mother and father. Even at their worst times, he and Caroline had never been less than a partnership, one which, for all the turbulence within it, was held together by the powerful dynamic of their mutual attraction. But they had extended none of that sense of inclusiveness to their son, and as George sat grieving for his wife, he might have reflected that he found himself in much the same position as his father had been before him: a man alone, alienated from a son he distrusted and despised. It would now be left to the generation that came after them to try to repair what George and Caroline had left undone. Frederick’s wife Augusta was pregnant again by the time the queen died. Caroline did not live to see the birth of her first grandson in June 1738. Frederick named the baby George, after his grandfather. It remained to be seen whether he had learnt more from the treatment he had received at the hands of his parents than George and Caroline had done; and whether he could prevent the legacy of bitterness that had so darkened his own life from surfacing to cast a similar shadow over that of his son.

CHAPTER 3
Son and Heir

FREDERICK AND AUGUSTA’S FIRST SON, George, was born on 24 May 1738 at Norfolk House in St James’s Square. He was a seven months’ child, and ‘so weakly at the time of his birth, that serious apprehensions were entertained that it would be impossible to rear him’.1 He was baptised that night, noted the diarist Lord Egmont, ‘there being a doubt that he could live’, but like his sister before him, the baby George clung tenaciously to life.2 In later years, he had no doubt whom he had to thank for his survival: Mary Smith, his wet nurse, ‘the fine, healthy, fresh-coloured wife of a gardener’. When she died in 1773, George was still conscious of the debt of gratitude he bore her. ‘She suckled me,’ he recalled, ‘and to her great attention my having been reared is greatly owing.’3 When told that etiquette made it impossible for the infant George to sleep with her, she had ‘instantly revolted, and in terms both warm and blunt, she thus expressed herself: “Not sleep with me! Then you may nurse the boy yourselves!”’4 The forthright Mary Smith won the battle, and with it the unwavering affection of the prince.

In 1743, Frederick moved his growing family – another son Edward had been born in 1739, and six other children were to follow, in almost annual succession over the next decade – to a bigger establishment. Leicester House, a large but ugly building, stood on the north side of what is now Leicester Square. It was not the most fashionable of neighbourhoods, being rather too near louche Soho for the politest society, and Frederick was by far its grandest inhabitant. His neighbours were businessmen, musicians and artists, most notably William Hogarth who had his studios across the square at number 32. Frederick was not short of places to live – he spent a great deal of money on nearby Carlton House, and rented properties for the summer on the Thames at Kew and at Cliveden – but it was Leicester House that became his principal residence. It was where he held informal court, assembling around him a group of ambitious young men who were as impatient as he was with his father’s government. With their support, Leicester House became the basis for Frederick’s political operations, the campaign headquarters from which he directed his attacks on the king’s ministers with such sustained effort that the term ‘Leicester House’ soon became synonymous with the very idea of princely political opposition. But the Soho property was also a family home; all Frederick and Augusta’s children grew up there, and their eldest son George seems to have retained an affection for it; he used it as his London house until very shortly before he became king.

George II never visited. He remained estranged from his son, although with the death of Queen Caroline some of the furious antipathy that had characterised their relationship ebbed away. The king occupied himself with his cards, his mistress and his military campaigns. His only engagement with Frederick was through the distancing formalities of party politics, where the two fought out their differences by ministerial and opposition proxies. They took care never to meet. Horace Walpole was once at a fashionable party where the usual precautions had somehow failed, and Frederick and his father were both embarrassingly present (‘There was so little company that I was afraid they would be forced to walk about together’), but this was a rare occurrence.5 Beyond the public stage of politics, the prince and the king lived carefully segregated existences.

Although he was now both paterfamilias and politician, Frederick continued to conduct his life with the same breezy goodwill and indifference to criticism that had so infuriated his parents when he was younger. If his ability to tell people what they wanted to hear coined him a reputation for duplicity, and his relaxed attitude to matters of political principle led to accusations of inconstancy, he was also singularly lacking in the anger and suppressed rage that had characterised so much of his parents’ lives. If he was resentful at their treatment of him, he concealed it very well; in public he appeared to be entirely unmarked by their baroque hostility. He was the least bitter of the early Hanoverians and, as such, seemed to have the best opportunity to the break the inheritance of dynastic unhappiness which his parents had passed on to him with such relish. In many ways, and with profound consequences for the development of his eldest son’s character, Frederick rose to the challenge. In his attitude to his wife and family, he represents a crucial and often underestimated bridge between the very different worlds of George II and George III.

Frederick’s conception of family life did not, however, extend to the practice of conjugal fidelity. He was his father’s son in that, at least. One of his favourites was Grace, Lady Middlesex, whom Horace Walpole described as ‘very short, very plain, and very yellow’. But, as Walpole saw, none of these affairs really mattered; they certainly did not disrupt the settled ecology of Frederick’s marriage, as those of his father had done: ‘Though these mistresses were pretty much declared, he was a good husband.’ Augusta, sensibly in Walpole’s opinion, ignored the transient lovers and reaped the benefits as a result. ‘The quiet inoffensive good sense of the princess (who had never said a foolish thing, nor done a disobliging one since the day of her arrival) … was always likely to have preserved her ascendancy over him.’6 Frederick’s relationship with his wife had none of the obsessive, jealous intensity that marked his father’s feelings for his mother; nor did it have about it the toxic undercurrents that damaged so many of those who came into too close contact with his parents’ passion.

His marriage was entirely lacking in the drama that characterised George and Caroline’s union, yet there is little doubt that Frederick loved and desired his wife. The prince, who was proud of his literary talents, wrote a series of verses to Augusta celebrating her physical charms, including ‘those breasts that swell to meet my love,/That easy sloping waist, that form divine’. But as the poem made clear, it was not her body for which her husband most admired her: ‘No – ’tis the gentleness of mind, that love,/so kindly answering my desire/ … That thus has set my soul on fire.’7 It was Augusta’s mild, unchallenging personality that Frederick found particularly appealing. From the earliest days of their marriage he had been delighted to discover that his wife was everything his mother was not: calm and pliable, with no discernible tastes or ambitions other than those her husband encouraged her to share. Her docility was one of her chief attractions, as Augusta herself seems clearly to have understood. Throughout their marriage, she never did or said anything to discommode or contradict him. One of the prince’s friends, in a parody of Frederick’s uxorious verses, added to the list of Augusta’s virtues ‘that all-consenting tongue,/that never puts me in the wrong’.8

Augusta’s willingness to please extended not just to what she said but also to what she did. She patiently indulged her husband in all his interests and foibles; in return, he found a place for her at the centre of his life. She accompanied him on all his excursions. Sometimes twice a week, they went to formal masquerades at Ranelagh pleasure gardens, where the princess, usually very modestly dressed, appeared ‘covered with diamonds’. Augusta gamely joined her husband in his pursuit of less grand entertainments. They went together to investigate the infamous Cock Lane Ghost, whose alleged spectral manifestation drew large crowds nightly (though the spirit failed to appear for them). She was also a dutiful participant in the pranks that Frederick enjoyed so much, reacting with the expected surprise when taken by him to visit a fortune teller, who turned out to be their children’s dancing master in heavy disguise. The politician George Dodington, who occupied a prominent place in the prince’s entourage, joined them on a typical day out in June 1750: ‘To Spitalfields, to see the manufactures of silk, and to Mr Carr’s shop in the morning. In the afternoon, the same company … to Norwood Forest to see a settlement of gypsies. We returned and went to Bettesworth the conjuror’s in hackney coaches – not finding him, we went in search of the little Dutchman, but were disappointed; and concluded by supping with Mrs Cannon, the princess’s midwife.’9

If the princess found Frederick’s pursuit of the eccentric and the exotic exhausting, she would never have said so. Perhaps she took more pleasure in their shared botanical interests. She and Frederick laid out the foundations of what is now Kew Gardens, jointly commissioning a summerhouse in the fashionable Chinese style, decorated with illustrations of the life of Confucius. Like her mother-in-law, Augusta’s only real extravagance was her spending on the gardens, where she built on the work Caroline had begun, erecting an orangery and completing the famous pagoda.

She played a less significant part in her husband’s other interests. For all his enduring fascination with low-life, Frederick was also a sophisticated consumer of high culture and keen to be seen as an urbane and discerning man of taste. He was a patron of the architect William Kent, and employed him to remodel the interior of his houses in his severe, classical style. In contrast to his father’s boasted indifference to the quality of the paintings that hung on his walls, Frederick was a thoughtful collector of pictures, buying two Van Dycks and two landscapes by Rubens. Horace Walpole, who was not well disposed to the prince, regarded his artistic ambitions as mere pretension until Frederick asked to see the catalogue Walpole had drawn up of his father’s extensive art collection at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. To his surprise, Walpole was impressed by the prince’s knowledge and appreciation: ‘He turned to me and said such a crowd of civil things that I did not know what to answer; he commended the style of quotations; said I had sent him back to his Livy.’10

Frederick was his mother’s son in his respect for intellectuals, if in little else. Like her, he enjoyed the company of writers. A keen amateur author himself (besides the poem written for Augusta and the disastrous play co-written with Hervey, he had a host of other works to his name), he sought out the company of John Gay, whose Beggar’s Opera, with its attack on Robert Walpole and the king, was attractive to him both culturally and politically, and James Thomson, whose poem The Seasons was hugely popular in the 1730s, and often visited Alexander Pope at his home in Twickenham. When Pope fell asleep in the middle of one of Frederick’s disquisitions on literature, the prince was not offended but stole discreetly away.

Built on the foundation of their stable marriage, and enlivened by the energy and diversity of the prince’s interests, Frederick and Augusta’s household was a comparatively happy place in which to raise children. It was certainly an improvement on Frederick’s, or indeed on his father’s, experiences of childhood. There seems little doubt that this was a conscious effort on Frederick’s part; he was determined to create for his own family the life he had never enjoyed himself as a boy. He was an attentive and affectionate parent, who enjoyed the company of his wife and children and was not afraid to show it. ‘He played the part of the father and husband well,’ wrote one appreciative visitor, ‘always happy in the bosom of his family, left them with regret and met them again with smiles, kisses and tears.’11 When the Bishop of Salisbury went to dinner with Frederick and Augusta, he was impressed to see that afterwards the children were called in, ‘and were made to repeat several beautiful passages out of plays and poems’ whilst their proud parents looked on. Beguiled by this unaccustomed image of royal family harmony, the bishop declared ‘he had never passed a more agreeable day in his whole life’.12 Frederick was particularly attached to his two eldest boys. When he was away, he was a diligent correspondent, his letters suffused with a warm informality. Writing to ‘dear George’ in 1748, he signed himself ‘your friend and father’. To ‘dear Edward’ he ‘rejoiced to find that you have been so good both. Pray God it may continue. Nothing gives a father who loves his children so well as I do so much satisfaction as to hear they improve, or are likely to make a figure in this world.’13 ‘Pray God,’ he once wrote, more wistfully, ‘that you may grow in every respect above me – good night, my dear children’.14

Frederick involved himself in every aspect of his children’s lives. In the country, whether at Kew or Cliveden, he arranged sports for them. There were skittles and rounders – played inside the house if wet, amidst the formal elegance of William Kent’s interiors. Everyone, including the girls, played cricket. All visitors were expected to join in, with neither age, dignity nor excess weight conferring exemption. When the rotund politician Dodington visited Kew in October 1750, he found himself reluctantly conscripted into a game. Further exercise for the royal children was provided by gardening. Each of them had a small plot to tend, but tilling the soil was not confined to the young. Here too, as the unhappy Dodington discovered, guests were compelled to do their bit, hoeing and digging with the rest of the family. ‘All of us, men, women and children worked at the same place,’ Dodington noted on 28 February 1750, adding the mournful postscript, ‘Cold dinner.’15 Having endured the perils of the cricket pitch and the rigours of the garden plot, visitors were also expected to join willingly in the practical jokes and horseplay for which Frederick never lost his taste. Dodington, who was almost as fat as he was tall, once allowed Frederick to wrap him in a blanket and roll him downstairs. The prince’s inner circle was not a place where ambitious politicians could expect to stand on their dignity.

In the evenings, the prince staged elaborate nightly theatricals in which all the family took part. Dodington recorded each night’s offering in his diary; the range of works was extensive, encompassing the classics – Macbeth, Tartuffe, Henry IV – to forgotten lighter pieces such as The Lottery or The Morning Bride. James Quin, a London actor, was recruited to coach the royal children in their performances. Many years later, when George III made his first speech from the throne as king, Quin commented with pride that ‘’Twas I that taught the boy to speak.’16 One of Frederick’s favourite pieces was Addison’s Cato, whose Prologue, with its enthusiastic endorsement of the principles of political liberty, was usually given to the young George to recite, as he did for the first time in 1749 at the age of eleven.

Should this superior to my years be thought,

Know – ’tis the first great lesson I was taught,

What, tho’ a boy! It may in truth be said,

A boy in England bred,

Where freedom becomes the earliest state,

For there the love of liberty’s innate.

If Frederick’s tastes shaped the leisure hours of his children, he was just as active in managing their education. He himself drew up a scholastic timetable, ‘The Hours of the Two Eldest Princes’, which laid out when and what George and Edward were to be taught, and appointed the Reverend Francis Ayscough as their tutor. Ayscough, a doctor of divinity, was not very inspiring, but the boys made steady progress under his instruction, and by the time he was eight, George could speak and write English and German. Frederick had the two boys painted with their tutor, who looms above them, formal in black clerical dress. Grey classical pillars rise behind them. The overwhelming impression is of chilly dourness; this was not, it seems, an atmosphere in which learning was likely to deliver either pleasure or excitement.

Then, in 1749 – the same year that the carefully coached eleven-year-old George delivered his eulogy on English liberty – Frederick replaced Ayscough with a far abler man. George Lewis Scott was a barrister and an extremely accomplished mathematician, and his arrival signified the prince’s intention to accelerate his sons’ academic progress. Their working day was long – they were required to translate a passage from Caesar’s Commentaries before breakfast – and the curriculum broad, including geometry, arithmetic, dancing and French. Greek was introduced for the first time, and after dinner, the boys were to read ‘useful and entertaining books, such as Addison’s works, and particularly his political papers’.17

The more demanding timetable reflected a new sense of urgency that had entered Frederick’s thinking, particularly in relation to his eldest son. At the beginning of 1749, he had composed a paper intended for the guidance of his heir. Its intentions were clearly set out in the title the prince gave it: ‘Instructions for my son George, drawn by myself, for his good, and that of my family, for that of his people, according to the ideas of my grandfather and best friend, George I.’ It was addressed directly and personally to his son. If Frederick were to die before he could himself elaborate on its contents to the boy, it was to be held by Augusta, ‘who will read it to you from time to time, and will give it to you when you come of age to get the crown’. ‘My design,’ Frederick promised, ‘is not to leave you a sermon as is undoubtedly done by persons of my rank. ’Tis not out of vanity I write this; it is out of love to you, and to the public. It is for your good and for that of the people you are to govern, that I leave this to you.’18 What followed was a detailed blueprint for good government, as seen through Frederick’s eyes. It sought to impress on George the nature of his future duties as king, head of his family, and father of the people. It stressed the importance of identifying himself with the country he would one day rule (‘Convince the Nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also this by inclination’).19 It urged him to decrease the national debt, and to separate the electorate of Hanover from Great Britain to minimise involvement in European wars.20 Such policies would reduce expenditure, making the king more solvent, less dependent on forging alliances with political parties, and free to pursue policies of his own devising. These, Frederick asserted, would be more likely to reflect the true national interest than the existing system, reliant as it was on the management of a host of often conflicting and selfish sectional interests. When presented to his son later as part of a wider constitutional framework, these were ideas that would prove very compelling to the young George; but what prompted his father to articulate them at that time, in a form that suggested so powerfully a kind of political last will and testament?

Although Frederick was only forty-two when he wrote the document, the 1740s had been a punishing decade for him and his followers. They had enjoyed some successes, most notably, and most pleasing from the perspective of Leicester House, the fall of George II’s favoured minister Robert Walpole in 1742. The prince did not entirely engineer Walpole’s defeat, but when begged by the king to save him, he refused to help the stricken politician. It had proved hard to capitalise on such triumphs. George II had denied Frederick a role in the army, both in the Continental wars of the mid-1740s and during the Jacobite rising of 1745. On both occasions he was forced to watch, humiliated, from the sidelines as his father and his younger brother William, Duke of Cumberland, rode to victory respectively at Dettingen and Culloden. Then, in 1747, Frederick’s followers were roundly defeated at the general election.

By the end of the decade, he was forced to come to terms with the ambivalence of his position. As Prince of Wales he was master of an alternative court, with over two hundred household posts at his disposal and the promise of preferment once he, eventually, came to power; but although he might be able to undermine or even destroy administrations, he could never be part of them himself. He could break, but he could not build; or at least, not until the king died. Dodington, now acting as one of the prince’s advisers, counselled waiting; but as he approached middle age, Fredrick’s appetite for the struggle seems, surely and steadily, to have ebbed away. Perhaps he suspected that the chances of achieving his ambitions were always going to be limited by the circumstances of his birth. He knew that, unlike his son, he could never be ‘an Englishman born and bred’, and gradually, he began to transfer his hopes for the fulfilment of his long-term goals beyond the possibilities offered by his own reign, concentrating instead on that of his heir. Writing his letter of ‘Instructions’ marked the beginning of that process. It was a sign of both what he hoped his son might one day achieve, and what he had gradually abandoned for himself. And if it marked the level of his ambitions for George, it was also perhaps a measure of his concern. He spelt out his blueprint for the future with such clarity perhaps because he had begun to doubt whether, without such precise guidance, the boy would ever be capable of achieving it. For, as he grew older, George did not seem to anyone – and possibly not even to his father – quite the stuff of which successful kings were made.

*

Though never a voluble child, with age George became steadily shyer, more awkward and withdrawn. He was ‘silent, modest and easily abashed’, said Louisa Stuart, whose father, the Earl of Bute, was one of Frederick’s intimate circle. She maintained that George’s parents, frustrated by his reticence, much preferred his brother Edward. ‘He was decidedly their favourite, and their preference of him to his elder brother openly avowed.’21 Edward was everything his older brother was not: confident, cheerful, talkative and spirited. Horace Walpole, who knew Edward well in later life, described him tellingly as ‘a sayer of things’. His natural confidence, thought Louisa Stuart, ‘was hourly strengthened by encouragement, which enabled him to join in or interrupt conversation and always say something which the obsequious hearers were ready to applaud’. It was very different for his diffident elder brother. ‘If he ever faltered out an opinion, it was passed by unnoticed; sometimes it was knocked down at once with – “Do hold your tongue, George, don’t talk like a fool.”’22

Frederick, it seemed, for all his genuine affection for his children, was still Hanoverian enough to prefer the spare to the heir. He was never deliberately harsh to his mute and anxious eldest son; but he was often exasperated by his unresponsiveness, and failed to understand its causes. He insisted to the boy that his ‘great fault’ was ‘that nonchalance you have of not caring enough to please’.23 He did not see that there was not a scrap of insouciance in George’s make-up, and that his son’s diffidence arose not from nonchalance but from a paralysing lack of confidence in his ability to fulfil his destiny. For Louisa Stuart, Frederick was less to blame than his wife. Beneath the compliant surface she presented to the world, Augusta nurtured a severe and unflinching personality, with a strong tendency to judge others harshly. It was Augusta, she said, who was ‘too impressed by vivacity and confidence’ and who failed to see that ‘diffidence was often the product of a truly thoughtful understanding’. She did not recognise the true strengths of her stolid elder son, ‘whose real good sense, innate rectitude, unspeakably kind heart, and genuine manliness of spirit were overlooked in his youth, and indeed, not appreciated till a much later time’.24

Had Frederick lived, the warmth of the genuine affection he felt for all his children might eventually have buoyed up the spirits of his tremulous heir; George might have matured under the protection of a father who, for all his criticism of his son’s shortcomings and lack of insight into their causes, nevertheless saw the protection of the boy’s long-term interests as his most important responsibility. But at the beginning of March 1751, the prince caught a cold. A week later, on the 13th, Dodington noted in his diary that ‘the prince did not appear, having a return of pain in his side’.25 He was probably suffering from pneumonia. For a few days, he seemed to improve. Augusta, who was five months pregnant, informed Egmont that Frederick ‘was getting much better, and only wanted time to recover his strength’. She added that ‘he was always frightened for himself when he was the least out of order, but that she had laughed him out of it, and would never humour him in these fancies’. She hoped her attempts to raise his spirits had worked as Frederick now declared that ‘he should not die in this bout, but for the future, would take more care of himself’.26

Dodington called at Leicester House on the 20th, and he too was reassured on hearing that Frederick ‘was much better and had slept eight hours the night before’. Everyone’s optimism was unfounded. Later that night, at a quarter to ten, Frederick died. The end came with shocking swiftness. Dodington reported that ‘until half an hour before he was very cheerful, asked to see some of his friends, ate some bread and butter and drank coffee’.27 Walpole heard a similar story. The prince seemed to be over the worst and beginning to improve when he was suddenly overcome with a fit of coughing. At first, Dr Wilmot, who attended him, thought this was a good sign, telling him hopefully: ‘Sir, you have brought up all the phlegm; I hope this will be over in a quarter of an hour, and that your highness will have a good night.’ But Hawkins, the second doctor, was less optimistic, declaring ominously: ‘Here is something I don’t like.’ The cough became increasingly violent. Frederick, panicking, declared that he was dying. His German valet, who held him in his arms, ‘felt him shiver and cried, “Good God! The prince is going.” The princess, who was at the foot of the bed, snatched up a candle, but before she got to him, he was dead.’28 He was forty-four years old.

The king received the news of Frederick’s death as he sat playing cards. George had not remarried; he had kept his promise to his dying queen, taking a mistress rather than a wife. He had sent for Mme de Wallmoden, who divorced her husband and in 1740 was given the title of the Countess of Yarmouth. It was to her that the king turned first. ‘He went down to Lady Yarmouth looking extremely pale and shocked, and only said, “Il est mort!”’29 Once the horror of the moment had passed, the king, who was too self-absorbed to be a hypocrite, did not pretend to be grieved. He had hated his son for years, and his sudden and unexpected death provoked no remorse for his behaviour. As 1751 drew to a close, he commented with characteristic candour: ‘This has been a fatal year to my family. I have lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it.’30 It was his final comment on a relationship which had begun in suspicion, matured into vicious acrimony and ended with estrangement. He felt neither guilt nor regret for what had happened, and never referred to Frederick again.

The prince’s funeral was the final reflection of his father’s disdain. It was, thought Dodington, a shameful affair, ‘which sunk me so low that for the first hour, I was incapable of making any observation’. No food was provided for those of his household who stood loyally by Frederick’s body as he lay in state; they ‘were forced to bespeak a great cold dinner from a common tavern in the neighbourhood’. No arrangements had been made to shelter mourners from the rain as they walked from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey. The funeral service itself ‘was performed without anthem or organ’ and neither the king nor Frederick’s brother the Duke of Cumberland attended.31 Even in the performance of his last duty to his son, George II could find no generosity of spirit.

He appeared in a better light on his first visit to Frederick’s bereaved wife and children, when he was clearly moved by their stricken condition. ‘A chair of state was provided for him,’ reported Walpole, ‘but he refused it; and sat by the princess on the couch, embraced and wept with her. He would not suffer Lady Augusta to kiss his hand, but embraced her, and gave it to her brothers, and told them, “They must be brave boys, obedient to their mother, and deserve the fortune to which they were born.”’32 It was a rare display of emotional sympathy from the king; but as the family sat huddled in their misery, they all knew that significant decisions must now be made about their future.

The most obvious solution would have been for the king to take over the upbringing and education of the young prince, bringing the boy to live with him at St James’s. At the same time, it might have been expected that the Duke of Cumberland would be made regent. As the king’s eldest surviving son, he would have been well placed to act for his father during his frequent absences in Hanover, and to be appointed guardian to the young George if the king had died while he was still a minor. In the event, none of these arrangements ever happened. They had been rendered politically impossible by the momentous events of 1745/46, the consequences of which were to have a profound effect on the lives of George, Augusta and indeed all of Frederick’s remaining family.

*

William, Duke of Cumberland, was loved by his parents with an intensity matched only by their disdain for his brother Frederick. Mirroring the actions of George I, it was rumoured that George II had once consulted the Lord Chancellor to discover if it would be constitutionally possible to disinherit his eldest son in favour of William. The disappointing answer he was said to have received did nothing to weaken the affection he felt for Cumberland, who shared many of his interests, particularly his passion for the army. Cumberland had been given all the military experience that Frederick persuaded himself he craved and had been denied. He was a capable soldier and at the age of only twenty-three was appointed captain general. ‘Poor boy!’ commented Walpole, ‘he is most Brunswickly happy with all his drums and trumpets.’33 When Charles Edward Stuart raised his standard in Scotland in 1745, Cumberland was the obvious candidate to put down a rebellion aimed directly at the survival of the Hanoverian dynasty. His reputation would never recover from the victory he won.

The possibility of regime change seemed a very real one as Bonnie Prince Charlie’s troops swept first through Scotland and then through northern England in the winter of 1745. As Carlisle, Lancaster and Preston fell, panic engulfed London. Even Horace Walpole was shaken out of his usual pose of ironic detachment, putting all his trust in the duke’s ‘lion’s courage, vast vigilance … and great military genius’.34 After Charles Stuart made the unexpected decision to turn back at Derby, Cumberland chased his army back to Scotland, where the two forces met on 16 April 1746 at Culloden. The duke’s victory over the exhausted Jacobites was total, and the aftermath of the battle exceptionally brutal, as Cumberland’s soldiers bayoneted wounded survivors. This was only a prelude to an extensive campaign of terror, intended by Cumberland to eradicate all possibility of another uprising. ‘Do not imagine,’ the duke wrote, ‘that threatening military execution and other things are pleasing to do, but nothing will go down without it. Mild measures will not do.’35 He was not alone in thinking extreme actions were called for. ‘I make no difficulty of declaring my opinion,’ declared Lord Chesterfield, ‘that the commander-in-chief should be ordered to give no quarter but to pursue the rebels wherever he finds ’em.’36 Cumberland’s troops pursued the defeated Scots into the glens and remote settlements of the Highlands, burning and murdering as they went, killing not just men of fighting age, but women, children, and even the cattle that supported them.

At first, Cumberland was fêted for the completeness of his victory. Handel composed See, the Conquering Hero Comes to mark his triumph; the duke was mobbed in the street, celebrated as the defender of constitutional monarchy. But as accounts began to arrive in London describing the methods by which he had achieved his success – and as the initial relief at the removal of the Jacobite threat began to fade – a sense of popular unease mounted. The atrocities appalled a public who, with the threat of a restored Stuart monarchy now behind them, did not feel liberty had been best protected by uncontrolled rape and murder. Simultaneously, suspicion of what Cumberland’s true intentions might be began to mount. At the head of a vicious and unstoppable army, what might he not attempt? Could he use it to break opposition as thoroughly in England as he had done in Scotland, and seize power for himself?

Frederick, who saw Cumberland’s success as a direct threat to him, did all he could to fuel hostility to his brother. He financed a pamphlet laying out in detail all the excesses committed by Cumberland’s troops, and his adviser Egmont wrote another, arguing that the emboldened duke’s next step would indeed be to mount a coup d’état. This was a complete fiction, but a very powerful one, that struck alarm into the hearts of otherwise rational politicians for nearly twenty years. In eighteen months, Cumberland was transformed in the public perception from conquering hero to ‘the Butcher’, a cruel German militarist with tyrannical ambitions and, unless his access to power was closely controlled, both the desire and the means to make them real.

So overwhelming was this scenario, even at the time of Frederick’s death five years after Culloden, that it made Cumberland unemployable in England. The king railed impotently against what he regarded as the traducing of his favourite, declaring that ‘it was the lies they told, and in particular this Egmont, about my son, for the service he did this country, which raised the clamour against him’; but he knew nothing could be done about it.37 He understood the political realities well enough to understand that Cumberland could never now be made regent. The disgraced duke bore his exclusion stoically in public – ‘I shall submit because the king commands it’ – but in private confessed himself deeply humiliated, wishing ‘that the name William could be blotted out of the English annals’.38

If he could not name Cumberland regent, the king had little choice but to appoint an otherwise most unlikely candidate, Augusta, who now held the title of princess dowager. And if she was thought competent to act in that capacity, he could hardly justify removing his heir from her control. Thus, against all expectation, the young Prince George was allowed to stay in the company of his mother. This decision was to have an extraordinary effect on the shaping of his character; as much as the premature death of his father, it was to determine the kind of man he became. Had he been exposed, while still a boy, to the worldly challenges of life at George II’s court, very different aspects of his personality might have emerged. Instead, he was allowed to retreat with Augusta into an increasingly remote and cloistered existence.

His mother’s intention was to protect him, and George – anxious and easily intimidated – was keen to be protected. He had responded to news of his father’s death with a sense of shock so profound that it was physical in its intensity. ‘I feel it here,’ he declared, laying his hand on his chest, ‘just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew.’39 He did not like his grandfather, whom he rightly suspected was irritated by his shyness and lack of confidence. (On one occasion, the king’s frustration may have taken more violent form; a generation later, walking round Hampton Court, George III’s son, the Duke of Sussex, mused: ‘I wonder in which one of these rooms it was that George II struck my father? The blow so disgusted him that he could never afterwards think of it as a residence.’40) But when George II arrived at Leicester House in the days after Frederick’s death, ‘with an abundance of speeches and a kind behaviour to the princess and the children’, his sympathy seemed so genuine that even the cautious prince was partially won over. He declared that ‘he should not be frightened any more with his grandpa’.41

Despite this, it is hard to believe that George II could ever have changed the habits of a lifetime and transformed himself into the steady, supportive father figure of which his heir stood in such deep need over the next few years. Certainly the prince did not think so. For all the king’s new-found concern, his timid grandson had no wish to test the depth of his solicitude by joining him at St James’s. He made it clear he preferred to live with his mother. Yet, although the prospect of staying with Augusta no doubt offered security to a young boy badly in need of solace, it was far from an ideal solution. The life Augusta made for her son, isolated from the world he would one day be expected to dominate, did nothing to prepare him for the role that his father’s death had made so terrifyingly imminent. The complicated politics that had ensured George remained in his mother’s care may not, in the long run, have done him much of a favour.

*

Until Frederick’s sudden death, the defining quality of Augusta, Princess of Wales, was her apparent passivity. She seemed to have no real personality of her own, but was entirely under the control of her husband. Hervey, who once memorably described her as ‘this gilded piece of royal conjugality’, claimed that she played no active role in his political life. Frederick, he reported, had once observed that ‘a prince should never talk to a woman of politics’ and that ‘he would never make himself the ridiculous figure his father had done in letting his wife govern him or meddle with business, which no woman was fit for’.42 George II, on the other hand, who always suspected there was more to his daughter-in-law than met the eye, used to declare: ‘You none of you know this woman, and none of you will know her until after I am dead!’43

The king was not wrong in alleging that Augusta was not quite the demure innocent she seemed. For all Frederick’s protestations, she was no stranger to his political ambitions during the late 1740s. She hosted the dinners at which he and his supporters thrashed out their strategies and engineered their alliances; she was discreet, trustworthy and, above all, unquestioningly loyal, identifying herself completely with her husband’s strategising. Significantly, it was to Augusta, and not to one of his trusted advisers, that Frederick entrusted his ‘Instructions’, encapsulating the programme he expected his eldest son to implement in due course, and it was she who was charged with explaining them to his heir and keeping them fresh in his mind. And after Frederick’s shocking demise, it was she who took brisk and immediate measures to destroy any incriminating material that might compromise his followers and his family.

As the historian John Bullion has shown, in the hours immediately following his death, she showed herself to be more of a politician than any of his dazed friends. While Frederick lay dead in the next room, she summoned Lord Egmont and outlined a decisive plan of action to be followed in the next few vital hours. ‘She did not know, but the king might seize the prince’s papers – they were at Carlton House – and that we might be ruined by these papers.’ She probably had in mind a document Frederick had drawn up in 1750 that was a blueprint for action in the event of the king’s death and described in some detail appointments that were to be made and policies followed. She gave Egmont the key to three trunks, told him to retrieve the papers and bring them back to her; she even gave him a pillowcase in which to carry them. When Egmont returned, she burnt the papers in front of him. Only then did she begin to consider what to do about her husband’s body, or inform the king of his death.44

Having dealt with the most pressing threat to her family’s security, she proceeded to manage her father-in-law too. When he arrived at Leicester House, ‘she received him alone, sitting with her eyes fixed: thanked the king much, and said she would write as soon as she was able; and in the meantime, recommended her miserable self and children to him’.45 Always pleased to be treated with the respect he thought he deserved, the king warmed to her submission, as she must have known he would. ‘The king and she both took their parts at once; she, of flinging herself entirely in his hands, and studying nothing but his pleasure; but minding what interest she got with him to the advantage of her own and the prince’s friends.’46 When she heard that the king had decided to allow George to stay with her, she did not forget to write and tell him how thankful she was.

Although Augusta was astute enough to have kept hold of her son, she had no idea what to do with him once she had him. She had no vision for his development, no sense of how best to equip him to face his destiny with confidence. She was not a strategic thinker; without imaginative leadership, Augusta’s instincts were always defensive. She had neither the desire nor the capacity to forge alliances or build networks of friendship and support for her son. Hers was an inward-looking nature, suspicious of those she did not know and habitually secretive. Dodington, who came to know her very well, thought the defining quality of her character was prudence, ‘not opening herself much to anybody, and of great caution to whom she opens herself at all’.47 As a result, her motives were often opaque, and her true feelings more so. Lord Cobham thought her ‘the only woman he could never find out; all he discovered about her was that she hated those she paid court to’.48

If she was an enigma, she was an increasingly sombre one. No longer obliged to accompany Frederick into the wider world, she quickly lost the habit of pleasure; she went nowhere and saw no one. But she did not appear to miss the life that had been taken from her with such cruel suddenness. Instead, she seemed to relish the opportunity to dispense with the trappings of her old existence, and emerge as a sober woman of early middle age, unencumbered now by the obligation to please or conciliate anyone but herself. Nothing illustrates more starkly the gulf between these two versions of Augusta than two contrasting portraits. In 1736, she was painted in a conventionally fashionable pose. Overwhelmed by the stiff ornateness of her dress, she is a tiny doll-like figure, rigid and stranded in the gloom of an oppressive grey interior. Of her personality, there is no sense at all. In 1754, when Augusta chose her own artist, the result could not have been more different. Jean-Etienne Liotard’s portrait is not an image designed to flatter. Augusta is simply dressed; she wears no jewellery, and her hair is pulled back sharply from her forehead. Its defining quality is its cool candour. Augusta’s gaze is wary; her whole posture suggests a guarded, watchful reticence. She does not seem a woman eager for enjoyment or delight; and it is perhaps possible to read in her expression a hint of the debilitating combination of anxiety and suspicion with which she came to view the world in the long years of her widowhood.

These were not the happiest qualities on which to build a family life, and it must have been quickly apparent to Augusta’s children that, as the halo of their father’s warmth and sociability dimmed, their world grew inexorably chillier. The amateur theatricals, the compulsory team sports, the trips and treats and jokery, the noise and lively bustle of their father’s daily round all gradually ebbed away. They were replaced by a carefully cultivated seclusion, in which all the pleasures were small ones.

One of the few people allowed to intrude into this increasingly remote and withdrawn existence was George Dodington, whom Augusta adopted as chief confidant after her husband’s death. A much-tried member of Frederick’s entourage, Dodington’s greatest asset was his understanding of the practical business of politics, drawn from a lifetime of holding office and the management of parliamentary interests, although he had many other sterling qualities: he was loyal, witty and humane, an ugly man with a complicated love life and a naive enthusiasm for extravagant grandeur. Walpole described his house in Hammersmith as a monument to rich, bad taste, crammed full of marble busts and statues, and dominated by a fireplace decorated with marble icicles. It is not hard to see why Frederick, with his predilection for the eccentric, should have enjoyed his company. That Augusta too soon came to value and rely upon him is further testament to her carefully concealed political acumen. Beneath his unprepossessing exterior, Dodington nurtured a sharp mind and a wealth of experience. He was an excellent ally for a woman who believed herself more or less friendless, a seasoned adviser who could help her navigate her way through the difficulties that lay ahead. Perhaps Augusta also recognised in him some of the warmth and conviviality that was in such short supply elsewhere in her household.

Dodington clearly missed his late patron’s relaxed expansiveness. He often struggled to penetrate Augusta’s ingrained reticence, but did all he could to support and encourage her. He recorded his somewhat stuttering progress in his diary, a rueful chronicle of his efforts to persuade Augusta to adopt what he saw as politic courses of action. It was not an easy task. He soon saw there was no chance at all that Frederick’s death might have opened the way for a serious reconciliation with the rest of the royal family. Beneath the blandly compliant surface she presented to her in-laws throughout her married life, Augusta hid a settled dislike and disrespect for all her Hanoverian relations which was evident from the earliest days of her widowhood. In 1752, she and Dodington were enjoying a gossip about the Dorset family. Dodington opined that ‘there were oddnesses about them that were peculiar to that family, and that I had often told them so. She said that there was something odd about them, and laughing, [she] added that she knew but one family that was more odd, and she would not name that family for the world.’49 It was a rare moment of playfulness – and the only instance of Augusta’s laughter in the whole of Dodington’s diary. Her antipathy was usually expressed with far greater resentment, seen most starkly in her attitude to the king. As Frederick’s wife, she had shared in all the humiliations that had been heaped upon him by his father; then, for over a decade, she had witnessed all her husband’s attempts to harass and embarrass George through the medium of politics. Her husband’s hostility and suspicion had defined her attitude to her father-in-law for twenty years, and continued to do so long after he was dead.

Augusta knew these were views that could have no outward expression. She told Dodington she fully understood ‘that, to be sure, it was hers and her family’s business to keep well with the king’.50 In public, she assiduously cultivated the role of dutiful daughter-in-law, obedient and tractable; but in private, she had nothing but contempt for her father-in-law. She was bitterly angry that George had refused to settle Frederick’s debts, which she considered a slight to his posthumous reputation, and furious when he refused to release to her the revenues from the Duchy of Cornwall that he had claimed for himself after the prince’s death. As she described how she had berated and harangued the king on the vexed subject, Dodington’s politician’s spirits sank; he was not surprised to hear that George rarely visited now. His absence did nothing to make Augusta’s heart grow fonder. Over a period of six months, Dodington heard her speak favourably of the king only once, and considered it so remarkable that he made a special note of it.

She was equally dismissive of the Duke of Cumberland, whom she referred to with heavy irony as ‘her great, great fat friend’, and who had also refused to assist in paying Frederick’s debts.51 She rebuffed all his attempts to build a friendship with his nephew. Augusta rarely missed an opportunity to mock or belittle the duke. ‘The young Prince George had a great appetite; he was asked if he wanted to be as gross as his uncle? Every vice, every condescension was imputed to the duke, that the prince might be stimulated to avoid them.’52 More seriously, Augusta accepted absolutely the popular belief – encouraged so assiduously by her husband – that Cumberland harboured unconstitutional designs on the throne. She drilled these into Prince George, who, as the sole obstacle standing in the way of such ambitions, regarded his uncle with nervous trepidation. Once, during a rare meeting alone with his nephew, Cumberland pulled down some weapons he had displayed on his wall to show the young prince; George ‘turned pale, and trembled and thought his uncle was going to murder him’. Cumberland was horrified and ‘complained to the princess of the impressions that had been instilled into the child against him’.53 It was not until after he succeeded to the throne that George shook off the distrust of his uncle nurtured in him by his mother.

Augusta soon found herself without friends. She could not seek the support of opposition politicians except at the risk of provoking the king to remove the prince from her care, and she was too deeply imbued with her husband’s opinions to seek allies from within the royal family. It was a tricky situation for which Dodington could see no immediate resolution. He begged Augusta not to act precipitately, and she assured him that she would do nothing rash and had made no dangerous alliances, insisting that she had ‘no connexions at all’. Dodington found this only too easy to believe. Isolated as she was, without friends, family or supporters, there was little he could offer her except patience, meaning she had no choice but to wait for the king to die. In the privacy of his diary, Dodington was more pessimistic about her prospects, recording his stark belief that she must ‘become nothing’.

*

As Frederick’s family drifted gradually but inexorably away from both their surviving royal relations and the active political heartland, they had only themselves to rely upon for company. In the mid-1750s, all Augusta and Frederick’s children were still alive; fourteen years separated the eldest, Augusta, from the youngest, baby Caroline, born five months after her father’s death and named to please her grandfather. In the 1930s, the historian Romney Sedgwick commented that ‘as a eugenic experiment, the marriage could not be considered a success’. His remark, though callous, contained an element of truth. Five of Frederick and Augusta’s offspring died either in childhood or in their twenties, and two were sickly from birth. Elizabeth, the second daughter, was thought by Walpole to have been the most intelligent of all the family – ‘her parts and applications were extraordinary’ – but her figure ‘was so very unfortunate that it would have been impossible for her to be happy’.54 She died in 1759, probably from appendicitis. Louisa, the third daughter, died at nineteen, having suffered from such bad health that even her aunt, Princess Amelia, ‘thought it happier for her that she was dead’.55 The youngest son, Frederick, ‘a most promising youth’, according to Walpole, died at sixteen of consumption.

Prince George was considered to be one of the best looking of Frederick’s family; he was also, as a child and a young man, among the healthiest. His elder sister Augusta, whose grasp on life had seemed so tenuous after the thoughtless theatrics surrounding her birth, grew into an equally resilient child, although her looks were never much admired. Walpole thought ‘she was not handsome, but tall enough, and not ill-made; with the German whiteness of hair and complexion so glaring in the royal family, and with their thick yet precipitate Westphalian accent’.56 She was eager, lively and boisterous, resembling her brother Edward in her love of a joke. William, Duke of Gloucester, the third brother, was as fair as Augusta and Edward, but of a very different disposition. Walpole, who knew him well, summed him up as ‘reserved, serious, pious, of the most decent and sober deportment’. He closely resembled his eldest brother, whose favourite sibling he later became. Henry, who became Duke of Cumberland after his uncle’s death, was small like his father ‘but did not want beauty’. He had, however, ‘the babbling disposition of his brother York, though without the parts or condescension of the latter’. His youth, concluded Walpole severely, ‘had all its faults, and gave no better promises’.57 The toddler Caroline was remarkable at this stage only for her beauty; the ‘German whiteness’ that contemporaries found so ‘glaring’ in her brothers and sisters had in her become a golden blonde. Taken together with her blue eyes and round, pink face, she was by far the prettiest of the family.

Dodington’s diary is peppered with glimpses of ‘the children’, flitting silently round the edges of the world in which he and Augusta occupied centre stage. Always mute, they move as an undifferentiated royal pack. ‘The children’ are sent to prayers; ‘the children’ come in to dine; ‘the children’ retire. Occasionally, the older siblings emerged from the group and joined their mother in simple, family pleasures and games. Dodington was excessively proud of his occasional invitations to join the family in such informal moments, and recorded them with palpable satisfaction. In November 1753, he went to Leicester House ‘expecting a small company and a little music; but found no one but Her Royal Highness. She made me draw up a stool, and sit by the fire with her. Soon after came the Prince of Wales and Prince Edward and then the Lady Augusta, all quite undressed, and took their stools and sat round the fire with us. We sat talking of familiar occurrences of all kinds till between 10 and 11, with ease and unreservedness and unconstraint, as if one had dropped into a sister’s house that had a family to pass the evening.’

Gentle, unforced intimacy of this kind represented Augusta’s household at its best. But while Dodington strongly approved of such warm domestic scenes, he knew in his heart that they were only part of what was required to prepare the older boys for their future lives. He added a wistful postscript to his lyrical description of his quiet night at home with royalty. ‘It was much to be wished,’ he wrote, ‘that the princes conversed familiarly with more people of a certain knowledge of the world.’58 At a time when George should have been learning how to conduct himself in society, he was utterly removed from it. By 1754, when George was sixteen, even Augusta had begun to worry that the narrow existence she had created for her son was failing him. She confessed to Dodington that she too ‘wished he saw more company – but whom of the young people were fit?’59 She recognised that her eldest son needed more experience of life, but could not reconcile this with her increasingly dark vision of what lay beyond the secure walls of home. For Augusta, whose character took on an ever bleaker cast in the years after her husband’s death, the world was a wicked and threatening place and it was her first duty to protect her children from its wiles. Wherever she looked, she saw only moral bankruptcy. She complained at great length to Dodington of the ‘universal profligacy’ of the youthful aristocrats who might, in other circumstances, have become her children’s friends. The men were bad enough, but the women were even worse, ‘so indecent, so low, so cheap’.60 Beyond the inner circle of the family, everyone’s behaviour, motives and desires were suspect; no one was really to be trusted. Exposed to temptation, even her own sons might not have the inner strength to resist it. The preservation of an untested virtue, secured by isolation and retirement, was thus the key foundation of their upbringing. ‘No boys,’ commented William, Duke of Gloucester, in middle age, ‘were ever brought up in a greater ignorance of evil than the king and myself … We retained all our native innocence.’61 In the end, Augusta’s instinctual desire to protect her children from the lures of the world proved stronger than her rational understanding that they must one day learn to master it.

If Prince George’s social and family life did little to equip him for the future, he was equally unprepared in almost every other practical dimension of kingship. As a young man, he was bitter about the failings he believed had left him so exposed. ‘I will frankly own,’ he wrote in 1758, ‘that through the negligence, if not wickedness of those around me in earlier days … I have not that degree of knowledge and experience of business one of my age might reasonably have acquired.’62 His formal education had certainly been a haphazard affair. After Frederick’s death, it was underpinned by no coherent plan and driven by political considerations as much as by the desire to equip the boy with a foundation of useful knowledge. The king had replaced George’s tutors with his own appointees; only George Scott, who did most of the actual teaching, survived as part of the new team. As the prince’s governor, George II appointed his friend Simon, Earl Harcourt, a loyal courtier whose principal task was to ensure that the prince was encouraged neither to venerate nor to follow the policies of his dead father. He was otherwise undistinguished, memorably described by Walpole as ‘civil and sheepish’.63 Thomas Hayter, Bishop of Norwich, filled the role of preceptor. His pupil had nothing but contempt for him, describing him in later life as ‘unworthy … more fitted to be a Jesuit than an English bishop’.64 A third new appointment was Andrew Stone, who became sub-governor. Stone, like Harcourt, was a political choice; he was the fixer and general factotum of the Duke of Newcastle, who served regularly as George II’s first minister, and could be expected to pass back to St James’s detailed reports of events at Leicester House.

Under this top-heavy array, George and his brother Edward were set to work. Their lessons began at seven in the morning, and ranged, as they had always done, well beyond the traditional curriculum. However, the more modern subjects – including science, which George particularly enjoyed – did not displace the traditional concentration on the classics. Caesar’s Commentaries remained a familiar if unwelcome feature of the princes’ daily routine, much to George’s frustration. ‘Monsieur Caesar,’ he wrote in the margins of one of his laborious translations, ‘je vous souhaite au diable.’ (‘I wish you to hell.’65) As his later life was to demonstrate, George had a lively mind, and as an adult would find pleasure in a wide range of intellectual pursuits; but he found little to engage his imagination in what he was taught as a boy. He lacked the aptitude to master ancient languages, and was, in general, poor at rote learning. His fascination for practical and mechanical tasks was regarded as further evidence of his intellectual dullness. Only in music did he shine, playing the German flute with self-absorbed pleasure. All the siblings were accomplished amateur musicians, the girls singing and playing the harpsichord. The love of music was one of the few passions he shared with his father, and one which would outlast his sanity. In all other areas of educational endeavour, especially those that required feats of memory, George was generally regarded as a failure, his apathy and inattention exasperating his instructors.

Augusta knew, as did almost everyone else in the political world, that her eldest son was not making the progress expected of him: ‘His education had given her much pain. His book-learning she was no judge of, but she supposed it small or useless.’66 She thought her sons had not been well served by their instructors. Bishop Hayter may have been ‘a mighty learned man’, but he did not seem to Augusta ‘to be very proper to convey knowledge to children; he had not the clearness she thought necessary … his thoughts seemed to be too many for his words’.67 She told Dodington that she had repeatedly attempted to challenge Lord Harcourt directly about what was happening, but he simply avoided her. She finally cornered him one night at St James’s, ‘and got between the door and him, and took him by the coat’; even then the slippery earl escaped her grasp with a platitude. She disliked Harcourt, not only for his elusiveness, but because he ‘always spoke to the children of their father and his actions in so disrespectful a manner as to send them to her almost ready to cry’.68

Stone, in contrast, ‘always behaved very well to her and the children and though it would be treason if it were to be known, always spoke of the late prince with the greatest respect’.69 But even he seemed to have a curious idea of what was required of him. ‘She once desired him to inform the prince about the constitution,’ wrote Dodington, ‘but he declined it, to avoid giving offence to the Bishop of Norwich. That she had mentioned it again, and he had declined it, as not being his province.’ When Dodington asked Augusta what Stone’s province was, ‘she said she did not know, she supposed to go before him upstairs, to walk with him, sometimes seldomer to ride with him and then to dine with him’.70

George’s tutors had reason to be nervous when called upon to offer interpretations of the constitution to the heir to the throne. At the end of 1752, Harcourt and Hayter turned on their colleagues Stone and Scott and accused them of Jacobite sympathies, claiming they were covertly indoctrinating George with absolutist principles. They offered no real evidence for their charges, and could persuade neither the king nor his first minister, Newcastle, to believe them. Both promptly resigned, but the recriminations surrounding the affair dragged on for over a year, and were not resolved until Stone had appeared before the Privy Council and the matter had been raised in the House of Lords. It was easy for Dodington to declare with passion that ‘what I wanted most was that his Royal Highness should begin to learn the usages and knowledge of the world; be informed of the general frame and nature of government and the constitution, and the general course and manner of business’.71 But, as the cautious Stone had understood when he refused Augusta’s direct invitation to do just that, attempting the political education of princes was a far riskier undertaking than teaching them Latin.

With the departure of Harcourt and Hayter, the king was determined to make one last effort to turn his fourteen-year-old grandson into the kind of heir he thought he deserved. Prince George’s hesitant and self-conscious appearances at the formal Drawing Rooms did not impress his grandfather, who had forgotten many of the tender professions he had made at the time of Frederick’s death. Unless taken in hand, he feared the prince would be fit for nothing but to read the Bible to his mother. He approached James, Earl Waldegrave, who had been a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and asked him to become the prince’s new governor. Confident, experienced and expansive, Waldegrave was a very different character from the ineffectual Harcourt, and his sophisticated presence introduced an unfamiliar flavour into Augusta’s circle. At first, everyone seemed to welcome both it and him, and Waldegrave used this early advantage to effect something of a revolution in the prince’s education. He recognised immediately that the most important task was to engage George’s fitful attention, and sought to do this by offering him a vision of knowledge that went beyond the traditional forms of learning his pupil found so unengaging. ‘As a right system of education seemed impossible,’ Waldegrave recalled in his Memoirs, ‘the best which could be hoped for was to give him true notions of common things; to instruct him by conversation, rather than books; and sometimes, under the disguise of amusement, to entice him to the pursuit of more serious studies.’72

Waldegrave thought that George might work harder if he enjoyed himself more. Unlike any of his previous instructors, he was convinced that beneath the habitual indolence, the prince had potential. The present glaring shortcomings in his character were, Waldegrave believed, less a reflection of his true nature and more the inevitable product of the circumscribed life he led: ‘I found HRH uncommonly full of princely prejudices, contracted in the nursery and improved by the society of bedchamber women and pages of the back-stairs.’73 Wider experience of the world might cure many of the faults that others had found so intractable.

As time went on, however, it became clear to Waldegrave that the kind of change he advocated – a relaxation of the regime of seclusion, a more active participation in society – would never be countenanced by Augusta. For all her anxieties about her eldest son’s education, she would not sacrifice any of her own prejudices to see it improved. She did not expect her authority to be challenged by her son’s governor. She explained to Dodington that she considered the post – and Waldegrave, while he occupied it – ‘as a sort of pageant, a man of quality for show, etc.’.74 Faced with her blank resistance, Waldegrave’s new measures ran slowly but steadily into the ground. Although he was supported in his endeavours by ‘men of sense, men of learning and worthy good men’, Waldegrave eventually concluded he could do nothing to make a real difference: ‘The mother and the nursery always prevailed.’75

By the mid-1750s, George’s formal education had done little more than confirm in the self-conscious boy an even greater sense of his own shortcomings. Morbidly aware of his faults, especially those of ‘lethargy’ and ‘indolence’ with which he was so often charged, he seemed incapable of rousing himself to do anything about them. He had, thought Waldegrave, ‘a kind of unhappiness in his temper, which if it be not conquered before it has taken too deep a root, will be a source of frequent anxiety’. The prince’s apparent preference for solitude concerned Waldegrave, especially as he suspected the boy chose to be alone the better to contemplate his misery: ‘he becomes sullen and silent and retires to his closet, not to compose his mind by study, or contemplation, but merely to indulge the melancholy enjoyment of his own ill humour’.76 He had no friends except his brother Edward, to whom he was very close. To everyone else, he revealed nothing of himself. The retired life he and his mother shared had certainly not forged a strong emotional bond between them. When Dodington asked her ‘what she took the real disposition of the prince to be’, Augusta replied that Dodington ‘knew him almost as well as she did’.77

As he drifted irrevocably towards a destiny that terrified him, George retreated further and further into a private world of remote introspection. Transfixed with apprehension by the prospect before him, lethargy overwhelmed him. Neither his tutors nor his family knew what to do about it, or understood that his much-criticised indolence was less a sign of laziness than a strategy to avoid engaging with a future he knew he could not avoid. By the time he was sixteen, in 1754, he had erected around himself a tough carapace of emotional detachment which no one could penetrate. But George’s life was about to be transformed by someone who would instil in him a new vision of who he was; and, for the first time, offer the anxious boy an inspirational idea of what he might become. He encountered the man who would change his life for ever.

*

John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was a well-connected aristocrat related to some the grandest names in Scottish politics, including the powerful Dukes of Argyll. For a man whose career was so dominated by the fact of his Scottishness, he spent a surprising amount of his early life in England. He was educated at Eton alongside Horace Walpole, who was later to paint such a malign picture of him in his Memoirs of the Reign of King George III. Bute married early, and for love: in 1736, at the age of twenty-three, he eloped with the only daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The girl’s furious father refused to make any financial provision for his disobedient daughter and her new husband. When his irascible father-in-law died some twenty years later, Bute inherited all his money and became extremely rich; but as a young man, he was always short of funds. Contemporaries were certain that only poverty – or ‘a gloomy sort of madness’ – could have induced him to take up residence on the remote island that bore his name. In the years before the Romantics induced the literate public to admire the wilderness, it was assumed no sensible modern man would choose to live so far from civilisation. Bute’s critics, of whom even in his earliest days there were many, asserted that his personality was ideally suited to his faraway, chilly home. ‘His disposition,’ one remarked, ‘was naturally retired and severe.’78 Others mocked his pomposity and high opinion of himself, his ‘theatrical air of the greatest importance’, his ‘look and manner of speaking’ which, regardless of the subject, ‘was equally pompous, slow and sententious’.79 On his island, Bute pursued the literary and scientific studies that were the mark of the aristocratic eighteenth-century intellectual, including ‘natural philosophy, mines, fossils, a smattering of mechanics, a little metaphysics’. His enemies claimed that this was all typical self-aggrandisement and that he had in fact ‘a very false taste in everything’.80 It was true that Bute was something of an intellectual dilettante, but in the field of botany, which was his great passion, he possessed real authority. His nine-volume Botanical Tables Containing the Families of British Plants, completed in 1785, created a system of classification that was a genuine contribution to scholarship.

In 1746, Bute left his island and headed south, hoping perhaps to improve his financial prospects. Once in London, he was soon noticed, but it was not the power of his mind that attracted attention. ‘Lord Bute, when young possessed a very handsome person,’ recalled the politician and diplomat Nathaniel Wraxall, ‘of which advantage he was not insensible; and he used to pass many hours a day, as his enemies asserted, occupied in contemplating the symmetry of his own legs, during his solitary walks by the Thames.’81 Bute’s portraits – in which his legs are indeed always displayed to advantage – confirm that he was a very attractive man. Tall, slim and with a dark-eyed intensity of expression, it is not hard to see why he was so sought after. It may have been his looks that caught the eye of the Prince of Wales. It was said that Bute first met Frederick at Egham races, when the prince invited him in from a rainstorm to join the royal party at cards. Soon he was a regular attendee at all the prince’s parties, and had unbent sufficiently to play the part of Lothario in one of Frederick’s private theatrical performances. The prince seemed to enjoy his company, and Bute was admitted to the inner circle of his court. Walpole asserted that Frederick eventually grew tired of Bute’s pretensions, ‘and a little before his death, he said to him, “Bute, you would make an excellent ambassador in some proud little court where there is nothing to do.”’82 But whatever his occasional frustrations, Frederick thought enough of the earl to make him a Lord of the Bedchamber in his household, and it was only the prince’s sudden demise that seemed to put an end to Bute’s ambitions, as it did to those of so many others.

After Frederick’s death, Bute stayed in contact with his widow. Augusta shared his botanical interests, and he advised her on the planting of her gardens at Kew. He is never mentioned in Dodington’s diary, perhaps because Dodington correctly identified him as a rival for Augusta’s confidence. As the years passed, Bute’s influence grew and grew, until, by 1755, he had supplanted Dodington and all other contenders for the princess’s favour. He had also won over her son, and without telling anyone, least of all the king, Augusta quietly instructed Bute to begin acting as George’s tutor. For all his experience in the ways of courts, Waldegrave, the official incumbent, seems to have had no idea what was happening until it was too late. Once he realised just how thoroughly he had been supplanted, Waldegrave was determined to leave with as much dignity as he could muster. The king pressed Waldegrave to stay. He was resolutely opposed to the inclusion of Bute – an intimate of Frederick’s – in the household of his grandson, particularly in a position of such influence; but Waldegrave knew there was nothing to be done. In 1756, the prince reached the age of eighteen and could no longer be treated as a child. Reluctantly, the king bowed to the inevitable, and Bute was appointed Groom of the Stole, head of the new independent establishment set up for George. To show his displeasure, the king refused to present Bute with the gold key that was the badge of his new office, but gave it to the Duke of Grafton – who slipped it into Bute’s pocket and told him not to mind.

When Horace Walpole wrote his highly partisan account of the early reign of George III, he maintained that there was far more to Bute’s appointment than anyone had realised at the time; it was, he claimed, the opening act in a plot aimed to do nothing less than suborn the whole constitution. In Walpole’s version of events, Augusta and Bute – ‘a passionate, domineering woman and a favourite without talents’ – conspired together to bring down the established political settlement. They intended first to indoctrinate the supine heir with absolutist principles, and then to marginalise him by ensuring his isolation from the world. All this was to be achieved in the most gradual and surreptitious manner. Ignorant and manipulated, George would remain as titular head of state; but behind him, real power would reside in the hands of Bute and Augusta. To add an extra frisson to a story already rich in classical parallels, Walpole insisted that Augusta and Bute were lovers, ‘his connection with the princess an object of scandal’. Elsewhere he was more blunt, declaring: ‘I am as much convinced of an amorous connexion between Bute and the princess dowager as if I had seen them together.’83

Related with all the passion he could muster, in Walpole’s hands this proved to be a remarkably potent narrative. For nearly two hundred years, until interrogated and revised by the work of twentieth-century historians, it was to influence thinking about George’s years as Prince of Wales and as a young king; and the reputations of Bute and Augusta are still coloured by Walpole’s bilious account of their alleged actions and motives. But in writing the Memoirs, Walpole’s purpose was scarcely that of a disinterested historian. First and foremost, he wrote to make a political point. Walpole was a Whig, passionately opposed to what he saw as the autocratic principles embraced by his Tory opponents, who, he had no doubt, desired nothing so much as to restore the pretensions and privileges of the deposed Stuarts. He was, he said, not quite a republican, but certainly favoured ‘a most limited monarchy’, and was perpetually on the lookout for evidence of plots hatched by the powerful and unscrupulous to undermine the hard-won liberties of free-born Britons. To that extent, the Memoirs, couched throughout in a tone of shrill outrage quite unlike Walpole’s accustomed smooth, ironic style, are best considered as a warning of what might happen rather than an account of what did – a chilling fable of political nightmare designed to appal loyal constitutionalists. Less portentously, Walpole also wrote to pay off a grudge. He considered he had been wronged by Bute, who had refused to grant him a sinecure Walpole believed he was owed: ‘I was I confess, much provoked by this … and took occasion of fomenting ill humour against the favourite.’84

Much of what resulted from this incendiary combination of intentions was simply nonsense, and often directly contradicted what Walpole had himself written in earlier days. In truth, there was no plot; Augusta was not ‘ardently fond of power’; neither she nor Bute was scheming to overturn the constitution; and it is extremely unlikely that they were lovers. But if the central proposition of Walpole’s argument was a fiction, that did not mean that everything he wrote was pure invention. The Memoirs exerted such a powerful appeal because Walpole drew on existing rumours that were very widely believed at the time; and because, sometimes, beneath Walpole’s wilder assertions there lay buried a tiny kernel of truth.

Thus, Walpole seemed on sure ground when describing the isolation in which George had been brought up, and the extraordinary precautions taken to keep him away from wider intercourse with the world. He was correct in his assertion that much of this policy had been driven by Augusta. He was wrong about her motives – the extreme retirement she imposed on her son was a protective cordon sanitaire, not a covert means of dominating him – but the prince’s isolation was observable to everyone in the political world, and of as much concern to Augusta’s few allies as it was to her enemies. Walpole was also right to assert that within the secluded walls of Kew and Leicester House, the future shape of George’s kingship was indeed the subject of intense discussion; but these reflections were directed towards an outcome very different from Walpole’s apocalyptic image of treasonous constitutional conspiracy. Finally, he was accurate in his suspicion that there was a passionate relationship at the heart of the prince’s household. But it was not, in fact, the one he went on to describe with such relish.

The stories about Bute and Augusta had been in circulation long before Walpole’s Memoirs appeared. Waldegrave, who never forgot or forgave the way he was humiliatingly ejected from his post around the prince, seems to have been the origin of many of them. ‘No one of the most inflammable vengeance, or the coolest resentment could harbour more bitter hatred than he did for the king’s mother and favourite,’ wrote Walpole with a hint of appalled admiration.85 For the rest of her life, as a result of these rumours, Augusta was mercilessly pilloried as a brazen adulteress; in newspapers, pamphlets, and above all in satirical caricatures, she was depicted as Bute’s mistress. One print showed her as a half-naked tightrope walker, skirt hitched up to her thighs, suggestively penetrated by a pole with a boot (a play on Bute’s name) attached to it. It was hardly surprising that Prince George was horrified ‘by the cruel manner’ in which his mother was treated, ‘which I will not forget or forgive till the day of my death’.86

However, for all the salacious speculation surrounding their relationship, it seems hard to believe that Bute and Augusta ever had an affair. Although Augusta clearly admired the attractive earl, writing to him with an enthusiasm and warmth that few of her other letters betray, to embark on anything more than friendship would have been quite alien to her character. She was too cautious, too conscious of her standing in the world, too controlled and reserved to have taken the extraordinary risk such a relationship would have entailed. But, in the complex interplay of the political and the personal that transformed the tone of Augusta’s family in the latter years of the 1750s, there was one person who surrendered himself entirely to an unexpected and completely overpowering affection. The diffident young Prince George had finally found someone to love.

Bute had been acting as George’s informal tutor for less than a year before it was plain that he had achieved what no one had been able to do before: win the trust and affection of the withdrawn prince. Augusta was delighted. ‘I cannot express the joy I feel to see he has gained the confidence and friendship of my son,’ she wrote in the summer of 1756, with uncharacteristically transparent pleasure.87 The prince himself was equally fervent, writing almost ecstatically to Bute that ‘I know few things I ought to be more thankful to the Great Power above, than for having pleased Him to send you and help me in these difficult times.’88

This was the first of many letters the prince wrote to Bute over nearly a decade; its tone of incredulous gratitude, its sense of sheer good fortune at the very fact of Bute’s presence, was one that would be replicated constantly over the years. Their correspondence illuminates the painful intensity of George’s feelings for the earl, from his speedy capitulation to the onslaught of Bute’s persuasive charm, to the submissive devotion that characterised the prince’s later relationship with this charismatic, demanding and sometimes mercurial figure. George’s letters also offer a remarkably candid picture of his state of mind as a young man. He opened his heart to Bute in a way he had done to no one before, and would never do again after he and the earl had parted. Many of his letters make uncomfortable reading; they reveal an isolated and deeply unhappy character, consumed by a sense of his own inadequacies, and desperate to find someone who would lead him out of the fog of despair into which he was sinking. George knew he was drifting, fearful and rudderless, towards a future which approached with a horrible inevitability. He was very quickly convinced that Bute was the only person who could deliver him from the state of paralysed inertia in which he had existed since his father’s death. ‘I hope, my dear Lord,’ he wrote pleadingly, ‘you will conduct me through this difficult road and bring me to the goal. I will exactly follow your advice, without which I will inevitably sink.’89

He knew he needed someone to supply the determination and resilience in which he suspected he was so shamefully deficient. He was delighted – and profoundly relieved – to find a mentor to whom he could surrender himself absolutely, to whose better judgement he could happily submit. Without such a guide, he believed his prospects looked bleak indeed. ‘If I should mount the throne without the assistance of a friend, I should be in the most dreadful of situations,’ he assured the earl in 1758.90

Bute also offered George genuine warmth and affection. His enthusiastic declarations of regard, his energetic and apparently disinterested commitment to his wellbeing, exploded into the prince’s arid, sentimental life. George’s devotion to Bute soon became the most important relationship in his life. ‘I shall never change in that, nor will I bear to be the least deprived of your company,’ he insisted vehemently.91 The growing intensity of the prince’s feelings was reflected not just in the content of his letters to Bute, but also in the way he addressed him. At first, he was ‘my dear Lord’, a term of conventional courtly politeness; soon this warmed into ‘my dear Friend’; but very quickly, the strength of the prince’s feelings were made even plainer. All obstacles, he wrote to the earl with unembarrassed devotion, could and would be overcome, ‘whilst my Dearest is near me’.92 Bute was not just mentor and role model to the prince; he was also the first person to unearth George’s hitherto deeply buried but strong emotions.

Bute broke through the prince’s habitual reserve partly by what he did, and partly by who he was. He was a compellingly attractive figure to a fatherless, faltering boy: handsome, assured and experienced, he was everything George knew he was not. Augusta, who was suspicious of almost everyone, admired and respected Bute, and the earl was unequivocal in his praise of George’s dead father, declaring that he had gloried in being known as Frederick’s friend. Unlike many of his predecessors, Bute actually seemed to like the prince, and he approached the prospect of training him for kingship with a galvanising enthusiasm. ‘You have condescended to take me into your friendship,’ he told the prince, ‘don’t think it arrogance if I say I will deserve it.’93 Bute’s breezy optimism about the task before him was in stark contrast to the dour resignation of previous instructors. ‘Use will make everything easy,’ he confidently assured his faltering charge.94

Leaving Latin behind at last, George and Bute embarked on a course of more contemporary study. Bute encouraged the prince to investigate finance and economics, and together they read a series of lectures by the jurist William Blackstone that was to form the basis of his magisterial work on the origins of English common law. Bute even ventured confidently where Andrew Stone had feared to tread. George’s essay, ‘Thoughts on the English Constitution’, included opinions that might have reassured Walpole, had he read it, so impeccably Whiggish were its sentiments. The Glorious Revolution had, the prince wrote, rescued Britain ‘from the iron rod of arbitrary power’, while Oliver Cromwell was described, somewhat improbably by the heir to the throne, as ‘a friend of justice and virtue’.95

Whilst Bute’s more liberal definition of ‘what is fit for you to know’ undeniably piqued George’s interest, it was his bigger ideas that consolidated his hold over the prince and secured his pre-eminent place in George’s mind and heart. The most significant of these was one which would transform the prince’s prospects and offer him a way out of the despondency that had threatened to overwhelm him since his father’s death. In the late 1750s, Bute proposed nothing less than a new way of understanding the role of monarchy, offering George an enticingly credible picture of the kind of ruler he might aspire to become. For the first time he was presented with a concept of kingship that seemed within his capacity to achieve, that spoke to his strengths rather than his failings. It changed the nature of George’s engagement, not just with Bute but, more significantly, with himself. It gave him something to aim for and believe in; the delivery of this vision was ‘the goal’ that George believed was the purpose of his partnership with Bute. Indeed, it far outlasted his relationship with the earl; until his final descent into insanity half a century later, it established the principles by which he lived his life as a public and private man.

In Bute’s ideal, the role of the king was not simply to act as an influential player in the complex interplay of party rivalry that dominated politics in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. It was the monarch’s job to rise above all that, to transcend faction and self-interest, and devote himself instead to the impartial advancement of the national good. This was not an original argument; it derived from Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke’s extremely influential Idea of a Patriot King, written in 1738 (though not published until 1749). Frederick had been much taken with Bolingbroke’s ideas, and the ‘Instructions’ he wrote as a political testimony for his son drew strongly on many of Bolingbroke’s conclusions, but Frederick was primarily concerned with the practical political implications of Bolingbroke’s ideas. The ‘Instructions’ is mostly a list of recommendations intended to secure for a king the necessary independence to escape the control of politicians, most of which revolve around money: don’t fight too many wars, and separate Hanover, a drain on resources, from Great Britain as soon as possible.

Bute too was interested in the exercise of power; but, always drawn towards philosophy, he was even more fascinated by its origins, and sought to formulate a coherent, modern explanation for the very existence of kingship itself. Choosing those measures which best reflected the ambitions of a ‘patriot’ king was secondary, in his mind, to establishing the justification by which such a king held the reins of government in the first place. For Bute, the answer was simple: it was the virtue of the king – the goodness of his actions, as both a public and a private man – that formed the source of all his power. Virtue was clearly the best protection for an established ruler; a good king was uniquely positioned to win the love and loyalty of his people, making it possible for him to appeal credibly to the sense of national purpose that went beyond the narrower interests of party politicians. But the connection between morals and monarchy went deeper than that. Virtue was not just an attribute of good kingship; it was also the quality from which kings derived their authority. And the virtues Bute had in mind were not cold civic ones peculiar to the political world, of necessity and expediency. They were the moral standards which all human beings were held to, those which regulated the actions of all decent men and women. Kingship offered no exemption from moral conduct; on the contrary, more was expected of kings because so much more had been given to them. Moral behaviour in the public realm was therefore indivisible from its practice in the private world. To be a good king, it was essential to try to be a good man.

The place where private virtue was most clearly expressed, for Bute as for most of his contemporaries, was within the family. Here, in the unit that was the basic building block of society, the moral life was most easily and most rewardingly to be experienced. The good king would naturally enjoy a family life based on shared moral principles. Indeed, for Bute, authority had itself actually originated within the confines of the family. ‘In the first ages of the world,’ as he explained to George, private and public virtue had been one and the same thing; in this pre-political Eden, there was no distinction between the two, as government and family were not yet divided: ‘Parental fondness, filial piety and brotherly affection engrossed the mind; government subsisted only in the father’s management of the family, to whom the eldest son succeeding, became at once the prince and parent of his brethren.’

Everything began to go wrong when families lost their natural moral compass: ‘Vice crept in. Love, ambition, cruelty with envy, malice and the like produced unnatural parents, disobedient children, diffidence and hatred between near relations.’ It all sounded remarkably like the home lives of George’s Hanoverian predecessors, as Bute perhaps intended that it should. The failure of self-regulating family virtue forced men to create artificial forms of authority – ‘hence villages, towns and laws’ – but as communities grew bigger, their rulers moved further and further away from the moral principles that were the proper foundation of power. The consequences were dire, both for the ruled and their rulers: ‘Unhappy people, but more unhappy kings.’96 The amoral exercise of power ruined those who practised it. ‘They could never feel the joy arising from a good and compassionate action … they could never hear the warm, honest voice of friendship, the tender affections and calls of nature, nor the more endearing sounds of love, but here, the scene’s too black, let me draw the curtain.’97

For Bute, the lesson of history was clear: good government originated in the actions of good men. What was needed now, he concluded, was a return to such fundamental first principles. He summed up his programme succinctly: ‘Virtue, religion, joined to nobility of sentiment, will support a prince better and make a people happier than all the abilities of an Augustus with the heart of Tiberius; the inference I draw from this is, that a prince ought to endeavour in all his thoughts and actions to excel his people in virtue, generosity, and nobility of sentiment.’ This is the source of his authority and the justification for his rule. Only then will his subjects feel that ‘he merits by his own virtue and not by the fickle dice of fortune the vast superiority he enjoys above them’.98

George embraced Bute’s thinking enthusiastically – and also perhaps with a sense of relief. He might have doubts about his intellectual capacity, and about his ability to dominate powerful and aggressive politicians, but he was more confident of legitimising his position by the morality of his actions. He suspected he was not particularly clever, but he was enough of his mother’s son to believe that he could be good – and perhaps more so than other men. He grasped at this possibility, and never let it go. It rallied his depressed spirits, jolted him out of a near-catatonic state of despair. It gave him a belief in himself and an explanation for his strange and unsettling destiny. It invested his future role with a meaning and significance it had so profoundly lacked before.

Bute’s vision of kingship transformed George’s perception of his future and shaped his behaviour as a public man for the rest of his life. Inevitably, it also dictated the terms on which his private life was conducted. He was unsparing in his interpretation of what the virtuous life meant for a king. He rarely flinched from the necessity to do the right rather than the pleasurable or easy thing, and he insisted on the absolute primacy of duty over personal desire and obligation over happiness. In time, these convictions came to form the essence of his personality, the DNA of who he was; and when he came to have a family, the lives of his wife and children were governed by the same rigorous requirements of virtue. As a father, a husband, a brother or a son, he was answerable to the same immutable moral code that governed his actions as a king. Bute taught him that in his case, the personal was always political; and it was a lesson he never forgot.

All this was to come later, however. When he took up his post, Bute was acutely aware of just how far short his charge fell from the princely ideal that was the central requirement of his monarchical vision. From the moment of his arrival, he set out to rebuild the prince’s tentative, disengaged personality, using a potent combination of threat and affection to do so. His first target was the prince’s lethargy, the subject of so much ineffectual criticism from Waldegrave and previous tutors. Bute was tenacious in his attempts to persuade George to show some energy and commitment to his studies; but it was a slow process, and one which required all the earl’s considerable powers of persuasion. By 1757, he had begun to make some progress, and the prince assured him: ‘I do here in the most solemn manner declare that I will entirely throw aside this my greatest enemy, and that you shall instantly find a change.’99 It was not just George’s academic dilatoriness that Bute sought to tackle; he also attempted to root out other potentially damaging aspects of his personality that might compromise his authority when he came to be king. His pathological and disabling shyness must and would be conquered. Again, George declared himself ready to take up the challenge. He promised Bute that he was now determined to ‘act the man in everything, to repeat whatever I am to say with spirit and not blushing and afraid as I have hitherto’.100

Although George confessed he was sometimes ‘extremely hurt, at the many truths’ Bute told him, he did not doubt that Bute’s ‘constant endeavours to point out these things in me that are likely to destroy any attempts at raising my character’ were for his own good, ‘a painful, though necessary office’.101 They were also, in George’s eyes, a sign of the depth of Bute’s regard for him, since only someone who really loved him would be prepared to criticise him so readily. ‘Flatterers, courtiers or ministers are easily got,’ his father had explained to him in his ‘Instructions’, ‘but a true friend is hard to be found. The only rule I can give you to try them by, is that they will tell you the truth.’ If George discovered such an honest man, he should do all he could to keep him, even if that required him to bear ‘some moments of disagreeable contradictions to your passions’.102

George had no difficulty in submitting to Bute’s comprehensive programme of self-improvement, sadly convinced that all the criticisms were deserved. His opinion of himself could not have been lower. He was, he confessed, ‘not partial to myself’, regularly describing both his actions and himself as despicable. ‘I act wrong perhaps in most things,’ he observed, adding that he might be best advised to ‘retire, to some distant region where in solitude I might for the rest of my life think on the faults I have committed, that I might repent of them’.103 He was afraid that he was ‘of such an unhappy nature, that if I cannot in good measure alter that, let me be ever so learned in what is necessary for a king to know, I shall make but a very poor and despicable figure’.104 When he contemplated his many shortcomings and failures, he was amazed that Bute was prepared to remain with him at all.

The idea that Bute might leave – that his patience with his underachieving charge might exhaust itself – threw the prince into paroxysms of anxiety. Bute seems often to have deployed the idea of potential abandonment as a means of reminding George of the totality of his dependency. The merest suggestion of it was enough, George admitted, to ‘put me on the rack’, declaring that the prospect was ‘too much for mortal man to bear’.105 His self-esteem was so low that George was sure that if Bute were to depart, he would have only himself to blame. ‘If you should resolve to set me adrift, I could not upbraid you,’ he wrote resignedly, ‘as it is the natural consequence of my faults, and not want of friendship in you.’106 George was endlessly solicitous about Bute’s health: the possibility of losing him through illness or even death was a horrifying prospect that loomed large in George’s nervous imagination; his letters are full of enquiries and imprecations about the earl’s wellbeing. When Bute and his entire family fell seriously ill with ‘a malignant sore throat’, the prince was beside himself with worry. He took refuge in his conviction that ‘you, from your upright conduct, have some right to hope for particular assistance from the great Author of us all’.107 It was inconceivable that God would not value Bute’s virtues as highly as George did; when the earl recovered, George presented his doctors with specially struck gold medals of himself to mark his appreciation of their care.

From the mid-1750s to the time of his accession, the entire object of George’s existence was to reshape and remodel himself into the type of man who could fulfil the role of king, as Bute had so alluringly redefined it; but this internal reformation was not accompanied by a change in his way of life. He remained closeted at home with his mother and the earl, and for all Bute’s desire to reform the prince’s personality, he left many of George’s deepest beliefs untouched – partly because he shared some of them himself. One of the reasons George found Bute so congenial was because he endorsed so much of the vision of the world that the prince had inherited from his mother. For all his confidence in the righteousness of his prescriptions, and for all the energy and enthusiasm with which he argued them, there was in Bute himself a core of austerity and reserve. He was not a naturally sociable man, preferring to judge society – often rather severely – than to engage with it. He had a natural sympathy with the suspicion and apprehension with which Augusta encountered anything beyond the narrow bounds of her immediate family. He offered George no alternative perspective, but instead confirmed the prince’s pessimism about the moral worth and motives of others, a bleak scepticism that was to endure throughout his life. ‘This,’ wrote George, ‘is I believe, the wickedest age that ever was seen; an honest man must wish himself out of it; I begin to be sick of things I daily see; for ingratitude, avarice and ambition are the principles men act by.’108

Bute’s counsels did nothing to dilute the mix of fear and contempt with which the prince contemplated the world he must one day join. ‘I look upon the majority of politicians as intent on their own private interests rather than of the public,’ George wrote with grim certainty.109 William Pitt, his grandfather’s minister, was ‘the blackest of hearts’. His uncle, Cumberland, was still, George believed, capable of mounting a coup d’état to prevent his accession: ‘in the hands of these myrmidons of the blackest kind, I imagine any invader with a handful of men might put himself on the throne and establish despotism here’.110 He had fully absorbed Augusta’s deep-seated hostility to his grandfather and, like her, could not find a good word to say about ‘this Old Man’. George II’s behaviour was ‘shuffling’ and ‘unworthy of a British monarch; the conduct of this old king makes me ashamed of being his grandson’.111 There was only one man deserving of George’s confidence, and that was Bute. ‘As for honesty,’ he told Bute, ‘I have already lived long enough to know you are the only man I shall ever meet who possesses that quality and who at all times prefers my interest to their own; if I were to utter all the sentiments of my heart on that subject, you would be troubled with quires of paper.’112

By 1759, Bute’s ascendancy over the prince seemed complete. The prospect of translating their political ideas into practice once George II was dead offered a beacon of hope which sustained them through adversity – it had been agreed at the very outset of their relationship that Bute was to become First Lord of the Treasury when George was king. But in that year, the earl’s authority was challenged from a direction that neither he and nor perhaps George himself had anticipated.

*

In the winter, conducting one of his regular inventories of George’s state of mind, Bute became convinced the prince was hiding something from him. Pressed to declare himself, George was cautious at first, but eventually began a hesitant explanation of his mood. At first, he confined himself to generalities. ‘You have often accused me of growing grave and thoughtful,’ he confessed. ‘It is entirely owing to a daily increasing admiration of the fair sex, which I am attempting with all the philosophy and resolution I am capable of, to keep under. I should be ashamed,’ he wrote ruefully, ‘after having so long resisted the charms of those divine creatures, now to become their prey.’113 There was no doubt that the twenty-one-year-old George was still a virgin. His younger brother Edward, far more like his father and grandfather in his tastes, had eagerly embarked on affairs as soon as he had escaped the schoolroom, but George had thus far remained true to his mother’s principles of self-denial and restraint. Walpole believed that if she could, Augusta would have preferred to keep her son perpetually away from the lures of designing women: ‘Could she have chained up his body as she did his mind, it is probable that she would have preferred him to remain single.’ But the worldly diarist thought he knew the Hanoverian temperament well enough to be convinced this was an impossible objective. ‘Though his chastity had hitherto remained to all appearances inviolate, notwithstanding his age and sanguine complexion, it was not to be expected such a fast could be longer observed.’114 Certainly this was how the prince himself felt, confessing to Bute that he found repressing his desires harder and harder. ‘You will plainly feel how strong a struggle there is between the boiling youth of 21 years and prudence.’ He hoped ‘the last will ever keep the upper hand, indeed if I can but weather it, marriage will put a stop to this conflict in my breast’.115

As Bute suspected, George’s disquiet reflected something more than a general sense of frustration. Incapable of concealing anything of importance from Bute, he wrote another letter which confessed all. ‘What I now lay before you, I never intend to communicate to anyone; the truth is, the Duke of Richmond’s sister arrived from Ireland towards the middle of November. I was struck with her first appearance at St James’s, and my passion has increased every time I have since beheld her; her voice is sweet, she seems sensible … in short, she is everything I can form to myself lovely.’ Since then, his life had hardly been his own: ‘I am grown daily unhappy, sleep has left me, which was never before interrupted by any reverse of fortune.’ He could not bear to see other men speak to her. ‘The other day, I heard it suggested that the Duke of Marlborough made up to her. I shifted my grief till I retired to my chamber where I remained for several hours in the depth of despair.’ His love and his intentions were, he insisted, entirely honourable: ‘I protest before God, I never have had any improper thoughts with regard to her; I don’t deny having flattered myself with hopes that one day or another you would consent to my raising her to a throne. Thus I mince nothing to you.’116

Lady Sarah Lennox, daughter of the Duke of Richmond (which title her brother inherited), was almost as well connected as George himself. Her grandfather was a son of Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kérouaille. She had four sisters, three of whom had done very well in the marriage market. The eldest, Caroline, was wife to the politician Henry Fox, and mother to Charles. Emily had married the Earl of Kildare, and Louisa had made an alliance with an Irish landowner, Thomas Connolly. From her youth, Sarah was one of the liveliest members of a famously lively family. As a very small child, she had caught the eye of George II. He had invited her to the palace where she would watch the king at his favourite pastime, ‘counting his money which he used to receive regularly every morning’. Once, with heavy-handed playfulness, he had ‘snatched her up in his arms, and after depositing her in a large china jar, shut down the lid to prove her courage’.117 When her response was to sing loudly rather than to cry, he was delighted.

When her mother died, Sarah went to live with her sister, Lady Kildare, in Ireland. She did not return to court until she was fourteen. George II, who had not forgotten her, was pleased to see her back, but ‘began to joke and play with her as if she were still a child of five. She naturally coloured up and shrank from this unaccustomed familiarity, became abashed and silent.’ The king was disappointed and declared: ‘Pooh! She’s grown quite stupid!’118

Those who found themselves on the receiving end of his grandfather’s insensitivity aroused the sympathy of the Prince of Wales. ‘It was at that moment the young prince … was struck with admiration and pity; feelings that ripened into an attachment which never left him until the day of his death.’119 That was the account Sarah gave to her son in 1837, and which he transcribed with reverential filial piety. In letters she wrote to her sisters at the time, Sarah was not so sentimental. After her first meeting with George, she described her clothes – blue and black feathers, black silk gown and cream lace ruffles – with far more detail than her encounter with the prince. She hardly spoke to him at all. Too shy to approach her directly, the prince had instead approached her older sister Caroline, stumbling out unaccustomed praises of her beauty and charm.

George was not the only man to find Sarah Lennox mesmerisingly attractive. It was hard to pin down the exact nature of her appeal, which was not always apparent at first sight. Her sisters failed to understand it at all. ‘To my taste,’ wrote Emily, ‘Sarah is merely a pretty, lively looking girl and that is all. She has not one good feature … her face is so little and squeezed, which never turns out pretty.’120 Her brother-in-law Henry Fox thought otherwise. ‘Her beauty is not easily described,’ he wrote, ‘otherwise than by saying that she had the finest complexion, the most beautiful hair, and prettiest person that was ever seen, with a sprightly and fine air, a pretty mouth, remarkably fine teeth, and an excess of bloom in her cheeks, little eyes – but that is not describing her, for her great beauty was a peculiarity of countenance that made her at the same time different from and prettier than any other girl I ever saw.’121 Horace Walpole saw her once as she acted in amateur theatricals at Holland House; his detached connoisseur’s eye caught something of her intense erotic promise: ‘When Lady Sarah was all in white, with her hair about her ears and on the ground, no Magdalen by Caravaggio was half so lovely and expressive.’122 Sarah, unfazed by the comparison to a fallen woman, declared its author ‘charming’. She liked Walpole, she said with disarming honesty, because he liked her.

This cheerful willingness to find good in all those who found good in her no doubt smoothed her encounters with the awkward Prince of Wales. They met at formal Drawing Rooms and private balls, and George’s attention was so marked that it was soon noticed by the sharp-eyed Henry Fox. At this point, he did not take it seriously; it was no more than an opportunity for a good tease. ‘Mr Fox says [George] is in love with me, and diverts himself extremely,’ Sarah told Emily wryly.123

Bute, however, knew that George’s feelings were anything but a joke. Having declared them to his mentor, George was now desperate to know whether Sarah Lennox could be considered a suitable candidate for marriage. It seems never to have occurred to him that this was a decision he might make for himself. He submitted himself absolutely to Bute’s judgement, assuring him that no matter what the earl concluded, he would abide by his decision. He hoped for a favourable answer, but insisted that their relationship would not be affected if it were not so: ‘If I must either lose my friend or my love, I shall give up the latter, for I esteem your friendship above all earthly joy.’124 The rational part of him must have known what Bute’s answer would be. It was inconceivable that he should marry anyone but a Protestant foreign princess; an alliance between the royal house and an English aristocratic family would overthrow the complex balance of political power on which the mechanics of the constitutional settlement depended.

To marry into a family that included Henry Fox was, if possible, even more outrageously improbable. Henry was the brother of Stephen Fox, the lover of Lord Hervey, the laconic Ste, who had been driven into a jealous fury by the ambiguous relationship between Hervey and Prince Frederick. Henry Fox was one of the most controversial politicians of his day: able, amoral and considered spectacularly corrupt, even by the relaxed standards of eighteenth-century governmental probity. A man described by the Corporation of the City of London as a ‘public defaulter of unaccounted millions’ was unlikely to prove a suitable brother-in-law to the heir to the throne. Bute’s judgement was therefore as unsurprising as it was uncompromising: ‘God knows, my dear sir, I with the utmost grief tell it you, the case admits of not the smallest doubt.’ He urged George to consider ‘who you are, what is your birthright, what you wish to be’. If he examined his heart, he would understand why the thing he hoped for could never happen. The prince declared himself reluctantly persuaded that Bute was right. ‘I have now more obligations to him than ever; he has thoroughly convinced me of the impossibility of ever marrying a countrywoman.’ He had been recalled to a proper sense of duty. ‘The interest of my country shall ever be my first care, my own inclinations shall ever submit to it; I am born for the happiness or misery of a great nation, and consequently must often act contrary to my passions.’125

George’s renunciation was made easier by the fact that he did not see the object of his passion for some months. The next time he did so, he was no longer Prince of Wales but king. George II died in October 1760; Sarah Lennox went to court in 1761, when all the talk was of the impending coronation. As soon as he saw her again, all George’s hard-won resolution ebbed away, as ‘the boiling youth’ in him made him forget all the promises he had made to Bute. Despite his undertaking to give her up, he took the unprecedented step of declaring to her best friend the unchanged nature of his feelings for Sarah. One night at court, he cornered Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, another member of the extensive Fox clan. The conversation that followed was so extraordinary that Lady Susan repeated it to Henry Fox, who transcribed it. The king asked Lady Susan if she would not like to see a coronation. She replied that she would.

K: Won’t it be a finer sight when there is a queen?

LS: To be sure, sir.

K: I have had a great many applications from abroad, but I don’t like them. I have had none at home. I should like that better.

LS: (Nothing, frightened)

K: What do you think of your friend? You know who I mean; don’t you think her fittest?

LS: Think, sir?

K: I think none so fit.

Fox then said that George ‘went across the room to Lady Sarah, and bid her ask her friend what he had been saying and make her tell her all’.126

The fifteen-year-old Sarah, never very impressed by George’s attentions, had been conducting a freelance flirtation of her own, which had just come to an end, and she was in no mood to be polite to other suitors, even royal ones. When George approached her at court soon after, she rebuffed all his attempts to discuss the conversation he had had with Lady Susan. When he asked whether she had spoken to her friend, she replied monosyllabically that she had. Did she approve of what she had heard? Fox reported that ‘She made no answer, but looked as cross as she could. HM affronted, left her, seemed confused, and left the Drawing Room.’127

Fox worked away, trying to discover the true state of George’s feelings for Lady Sarah. Despite the unfortunate snub, they seemed to Fox as strong as ever. He was less certain, however, of where they might lead. Fox told his wife that he was not sure whether George really intended to marry her, adding that ‘whether Lady Sarah shall be told of what I am sure of, I leave to the reader’s discretion’.128 If a crown was out of the question, it might be worth Sarah settling for the role of royal mistress. At the Birthday Ball a few months later, Fox’s hopes of the ultimate prize revived once more. ‘He had no eyes but for her, and hardly talked to anyone else … all eyes were fixed on them, and the next morning all tongues observing on the particularity of his behaviour.’129 But after over a year of encouraging signals, there was still no sign of any meaningful declaration from the king. Determined to bring matters to a head, Lady Sarah was sent back to court with very precise instructions to do all she could to extract from her vague suitor some concrete sense of his intentions. As she explained to Lady Susan, Fox had coached her to perfection: ‘I must pluck up my spirits, and if I am asked if I have thought of … or if I approve of … I am to look him in the face and with an earnest but good-humoured countenance, say “that I don’t know what I ought to think”. If the meaning is explained, I must say “that I can hardly believe it” and so forth.’ It was all very demanding. ‘In short, I must show I wish it to be explained, without seeming to suggest any other meaning; what a task it is. God send that I may be enabled to go through with it. I am allowed to mutter a little, provided that the words astonished, surprised, understand and meaning are heard.’130

Yet for all Lady Sarah’s careful preparation, she could not get near the king, and nothing came of it. Then, at the end of June 1761, the king made yet another of his cryptically encouraging remarks, this time to Sarah’s sister Emily, telling her: ‘For God’s sake, remember what I said to Lady Susan … and believe that I have the strongest attachment.’ A few days later, Fox was dumbstruck to be told that the meeting of the Privy Council summoned for 8 July was ‘to declare His Majesty’s intention to marry a Princess of Mecklenburg!’131

No one could believe it, least of all Sarah. On the day after the meeting – and its purpose – had been announced, ‘the hypocrite had the face to come up and speak to me with all the good humour in the world, and seemed to want to speak to me but was afraid. There is something so astonishing in all this that I can hardly believe …’132 For months, Lady Sarah and Fox puzzled and obsessed over what the strange and confusing episode had meant. Lady Sarah could not help but feel humiliated, but was determined not to let others see it. ‘Luckily for me, I did not love him, and only liked him, nor did the title weigh anything with me; or so little at least, that my disappointment did not affect my spirits above one hour or two, I believe.’133 If that was an exaggeration born of bravado, it was nonetheless true that she had recovered her spirits sufficiently to accept without a qualm the invitation to act as one of the bridesmaids at George’s wedding a few months later. ‘Well, Sal,’ sighed Fox, making his own final comment on the whole affair, ‘you are the first virgin’ – or as he jokingly pronounced it, ‘the first vargin’ – ‘in England, and you shall take your place in spite of them all, and the king shall behold your pretty face and weep.’134

Had either Fox or Lady Sarah asked George to explain his behaviour, it is hard to know what he might have said. No one could deny that his conduct had not been strictly honourable. Although he had not made a direct proposal of marriage, he had come pretty close to it, and he had certainly encouraged Sarah to think of him as some kind of suitor when he was not, as he knew only too well, in a position to offer any respectable outcome to their developing relationship. By January 1761, preliminary enquiries had begun in Germany to find him a woman he could marry, but, despite all his assurances to Bute and to himself, he was still irresistibly drawn to Sarah Lennox, dropping suggestions and making promises that he knew he could not keep. When, in the spring, he made his fateful declaration to Lady Susan Fox-Strangways, he was privately reading reports evaluating the looks and characters of every German Protestant princess of marriageable age. His formal proposal to the Princess of Mecklenburg was accepted on 17 June, only days before he made yet another of his insistent speeches to Sarah’s sister Emily, beseeching her to ‘believe that I have the strongest attachment’.

George’s motives, in the end, remain opaque; but perhaps he explained his actions to himself by considering them as the contradictory product of the two conflicting aspects of his identity. The king in him submitted, as he knew he must, to an arranged marriage with a woman he had never seen; but the ‘boiling youth of 21 years’ found it harder to accept that he ‘must often act contrary to my passions’, and that to ‘the interest of my country … my own inclinations shall ever submit’. In 1760–61, for the first and only time in his life, George allowed his heart to rule his head and followed the call of instinct, not obligation. He knew from the beginning which way it would end, recognising that he was formed for duty not rebellion. However, before the world of you shall closed inevitably and finally over the prospect of you could, he enjoyed a brief flirtation with the alternative. While he kept his sanity, he would never stray again.

CHAPTER 4
The Right Wife

DEATH HAD COME SUDDENLY UPON George II, with very little regard for his dignity. Horace Walpole heard that the last day of the king’s life had been conducted with the same punctiliousness which had marked all his actions. At six in the morning he had been served his breakfast chocolate. ‘At seven, for everything with him was exact and periodic, he went to his closet to dismiss it.’ When he did not emerge from his private lavatory, his valet, Schroeder, grew alarmed. Drawing closer to the door, he ‘heard something like a groan. He ran in, and found the king on the floor.’ He had cut the right side of his face as he collapsed. Schroeder may have been the author of the laconic coded note hurriedly sent to the young Prince of Wales informing him what had happened to his grandfather. The stricken king did not respond to his valet, nor to the anxious ministrations of his servants, who carried him back to the more decorous surroundings of his bedroom. By the time they had summoned his spinster daughter Amelia, he was beyond help. Amelia’s sight was very poor, and when she saw her father laid on his bed she did not realise he was already dead. Walpole was told that ‘they had not closed his eyes’. Amelia bent down, ‘close to his face and concluded he spoke to her, though she could not hear him – guess what a shock when she found out the truth’.1

George II was the first reigning monarch to have died in England for nearly fifty years. His funeral was intended to be an event both sombre and imposing, reflecting the dignity of the office of kingship and the mourning of a bereaved nation. It was held at night, and began with suitable solemnity, accompanied by muffled drum rolls and bells tolling in the darkness. Walpole, who could never resist the lure of a ceremony, was present throughout the proceedings. He thought the early stages were very impressive, and was moved, despite himself, by the severe choreography that marked the coffin’s journey to Westminster Abbey. But once inside the chapel, he was sorry to see that discipline and decorum fell apart: ‘No order was observed; people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeoman of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers.’ The dead king, with his obsessive devotion to the niceties of correct behaviour, would have been appalled. Walpole noticed that only the Duke of Cumberland – the chief mourner and the son George II had loved above all his other children – behaved as his father would have wished. ‘His leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it nearly two hours; his face bloated and distorted by his late paralytic stroke … Yet he bore it all with firm and unaffected countenance.’

The same could not be said for the Duke of Newcastle, who had served as the late king’s first minister, and whose grief was flamboyantly unconstrained. ‘He fell back into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back in his stall, the Archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle.’ The sardonic Walpole noticed that Newcastle’s distress did not prevent him from surreptitiously making himself as comfortable as he could in cold and clammy circumstances. When Cumberland tried to shift his position, ‘feeling himself weighed down, and turning round, he found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing on his train to avoid the chill of the marble’.2

For all the incipient disorder that so often overwhelmed even the most sober eighteenth-century spectacles, the final act of the funeral was a moment of genuine pathos. The king had always intended that he would be buried alongside his long-dead wife. Now, as his remains were placed in the grave next to hers, it was apparent that their two coffins had been constructed without sides, so that their bones would eventually mingle. Twenty-three years after her death, George and Caroline were united once more.

Mourning for George II was subdued. His death had been expected for so long – he was seventy-six when he died, the oldest king to sit on the throne since Edward the Confessor – that the public response to it was inevitably muted. The Duke of Newcastle, whose tears were perhaps more heartfelt than Walpole allowed, was one of the few who seemed genuinely moved, declaring that he ‘had lost the best king, the best master, the best friend that ever a subject had’.3 Most other verdicts were distinctly cooler; in many of his obituaries, it was George’s least attractive characteristics – his parsimony, his boorishness and his proudly declared lack of intellectual refinement – which featured most prominently. Walpole thought his disdain for the literary world had a very direct and adverse impact on his posthumous reputation, musing that if he had pensioned more writers, he might have enjoyed a better press at the time of his death. As it was, George had never laid himself out to court approval, and his character was not one that attracted easy plaudits or unmixed admiration. In death, as in life, he remained a difficult man to love.

However, there were some among his contemporaries who looked beyond his very visible failings and eccentricities and recognised qualities of greater worth. Lord Waldegrave, once the reluctant governor to the unhappy Prince of Wales, was convinced that with time, ‘those specks and blemishes that sully the brightest characters’ would be forgotten and George would be remembered as a king ‘under whose government the people have enjoyed the greatest happiness’.4 Elizabeth Montagu, an intellectual with no inherent admiration for kings, was another who praised the late king’s somewhat undervalued virtues: ‘With him, our laws and liberties were safe; he possessed to a great degree the confidence of his people and the respect of foreign governments; and a certain steadiness of character made him of great consequence in these unsettled times.’ He had not, she admitted, been a particularly heroic figure – ‘his character would not afford subject for epic poetry’ – but she thought him none the worse for that. Indeed, she wondered if his lack of interest in the lofty and the ideal was not his best quality, praising his conviction that ‘common sense [was] the best panegyric’.5

The old king was certainly not much regretted by the man who succeeded him. Relations between George II and his heir had not been good in the years leading up to his death. The unstoppable ascendancy of Bute had alarmed the king, who distrusted him, and the fervency of the prince’s devotion left no room in his emotional life for any other male authority figure. In private, the young George was intimidated and repelled by the king’s loud, blustering invective; in his public role, he longed, as had his father before him, to be released from the frustrations which curtailed his political actions as Prince of Wales. Only his grandfather’s death could deliver him from this limbo, and he and Bute awaited the inevitable with ill-disguised eagerness. In 1758, when George II fell seriously ill, one observer commented on the excitement with which the prince’s household greeted the news, ‘how sure’ they were ‘that it was all over, and in what spirits they were in’.6

As his opinion of the king sank ever lower, the prince was determined that there was one area of his life over which his grandfather should have no influence. ‘I can never agree to marry whilst this Old Man lives,’ he told Bute. ‘I will rather undergo anything ever so disagreeable than put my trust in him for a matter of such delicacy.’ It was probably for this reason that, even after Bute had decisively scuppered his hopes of marrying Sarah Lennox, he made no public move to find a more acceptable spouse. In private, however, he was more pragmatic, preparing for the inescapable eventuality of an arranged marriage even as he carried on his doomed flirtation with the unattainable Sarah. Safely secluded from any potential interference from his grandfather, the prince had begun to explore more realistic matrimonial prospects. Closeted with his mother, he was spending his evenings ‘looking in the New Berlin Almanack for princesses, where three new ones have been found, as yet unthought of’.7

When the much-anticipated moment of his grandfather’s death finally arrived, one of George’s first acts was to promote the issue of his marriage to the top of his personal agenda. He had maintained an extraordinary discipline over his desires, but did not intend to wait any longer than was absolutely necessary to become a virtuous and properly satisfied husband. Even before the old king’s funeral had taken place, George summoned Baron Munchausen, the Hanoverian minister in London, and instructed him to begin investigating potential candidates for the vacant position of Queen of England.

George had a very clear idea of the kind of woman he was looking for: he hoped to find a helpmeet and a companion who would share his vision of a morally regenerated monarchy, and who would be happy to play her allotted role in his great domestic project. Physical attraction did not rank particularly high on his list of requirements; and he was not interested in women of fashion, influenced perhaps by his great-grandfather’s unhappy experience with a high-maintenance beauty. He told Munchausen he hoped his future wife would have a good general understanding, but stipulated she should have no taste for politics. He had no desire to be managed in public life by an intellectual superior, which he suspected had been his grandfather’s fate. Not over-confident in the strength of his own character, the attributes he sought in a woman were mild, calm, unassuming ones; but equally he hoped for something more than mere colourless docility. He was keen to find a spouse who would actively appreciate his seriousness of mind, and welcome the continence and discipline which he intended should be the defining qualities of his adult life. A strong religious sense, a deep-rooted understanding of the importance of duty, and a willingness unhesitatingly to identify her interests with his own were also of prime importance. Years before, his mother had rejected a princess proposed by the old king as a possible wife for his grandson: Augusta was concerned the girl would take after her mother, intriguing, meddling and ‘the most sarcastical person in the world’. She knew ‘such a character would not do for George’. A loud, uncooperative, pleasure-seeking woman ‘would not only hurt him in his public life but make him uneasy in his private situation’.8 George knew his mother was right. If he was to have any chance of reforming kingship from within, a great deal depended on his finding the right wife.

The pool of possibilities was not large: a British king had to marry a Protestant, ruling out an alliance with the great nation states of France and Spain. George II’s daughters had taken husbands from Holland and Denmark, and a princess of Denmark was briefly considered, until she was discovered to be already promised, and dropped out of the running. Otherwise, George concentrated his search entirely within German principalities and dukedoms. Germany was the spiritual home of his dynasty; it had provided wives for his father, grandfather and great-grandfather; he was personally related to many of the ducal and princely rulers, and through them could expect to access useful knowledge about the characters and dispositions of potential brides. Germany was not only known territory for George; it was also one in which he was unequivocally the dominant suitor. He was an incomparably attractive catch, ruling a country that was richer and more powerful than most of the small princely states put together. There was little doubt that anyone he approached would consent to his invitation; the only difficulty lay in deciding whom to ask.

When the king first approached him, Munchausen had been able to think of only two princesses who might match his requirements. One, Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, was the younger sister of the girl who had been proposed to George as a potential wife by his grandfather several years before, and briskly rejected. Elizabeth was only fourteen, but her youth was only part of the reason George was reluctant to consider her. Her prospects were irrevocably tainted in his eyes by the old king’s attempts to bring about the earlier alliance, and he was obstinately prejudiced against the whole family as a result. Munchausen’s only other immediate candidate was Frederica Louise of Saxe-Gotha. She was nineteen – a suitable age – and Munchausen had heard many good things about her; however, he felt constrained to add that, like her mother, she was reputed to be very interested in philosophy. George replied with some vehemence that this description made the princess repugnant to him from every point of view.9 He added that he was not at all discouraged by the shortcomings of these first contenders, assuring Munchausen that, perhaps as a result of his study of the New Berlin Almanack, he knew there were many other princesses to consider.

Bute later presented Munchausen with a list, drawn up in George’s handwriting, of the marriageable princesses who had caught his eye. Armed with these names, Munchausen was directed to begin the search in earnest. He was told to ask his brother, chief minister in Hanover, to make discreet enquiries about the character and disposition of all the women on the list. Bute emphasised that speed was of the essence. The king wanted the matter resolved as soon as possible, and so, for his own reasons, did Bute. He had seen how severely Sarah Lennox had tried George’s determination not to involve himself with women, and understood that marriage could be delayed no longer. Both he and Augusta had done all they could to instil in the young man a deep-seated conviction that it was one of his most important duties to avoid entanglements with designing females, and, responsive as he always was to the pull of obligation, George had so far complied; but both anticipated with apprehension the possible advent of a mistress, with her own agenda to pursue and her own relatives to advance. A lover was thus far more to be feared than a wife, and it was not surprising that Bute confided to Munchausen that he could not be happy until he saw the young king happily married. He dreaded the danger of his being led astray, he told the minister, out of the good way in which he had been at such pains to keep him.10

Munchausen’s brother, himself an experienced politician, responded immediately to the sense of urgency communicated by both George and Bute and sent back a report containing his initial findings on the front-runners. Frederica of Saxe-Gotha, whose philosophical interests had so dismayed the king, was firmly dismissed: Munchausen had heard she was scarred by smallpox; he confided privately to his brother that she was rumoured to be deformed. More promising was Philippa of Schwedt, sixteen years old and a niece of Frederick the Great. Caroline of Darmstadt was considered to be worth further investigation. Munchausen was keen to keep Elizabeth of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel as a possibility, despite discouraging signals from the king. She was reputed to be very beautiful. It was true she was young, but Munchausen insisted she was very well developed for her age, although he admitted it might require a proper medical opinion to determine her potential childbearing capacity.11

Almost as an afterthought, Munchausen added an idea of his own: Sophia Charlotte, of the tiny duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, looked promising. He had heard she was quiet, unassuming, of unimpeachable respectability, and was said to have been very properly educated by her mother, ‘une princesse d’un esprit solide’. He undertook to find out more about all the princesses, preferably from those who had actually met them, and, if possible, from an Englishman, who might be expected to have a better understanding of the king’s taste. His own preference was for the Princesses of Brunswick and Schwedt; he doubted whether any of the others had been brought up in circumstances of sufficient grandeur to prepare them for the role of Queen of England.12 George and Bute did not entirely agree. Having read Munchausen’s report, they instructed him to concentrate on the Princesses of Schwedt, Darmstadt and Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and to consider the Brunswick princess only if all other options failed. Bute told Munchausen her youth counted against her, but Munchausen believed it was the continued association of her family with George II’s wishes that had set the king’s mind against her. George, it seemed, and as he declared, was determined not to be ‘be-Wolfenbüttled’.

It took Munchausen some weeks to complete the next stage of his enquiries, and it was not until January 1761 that a detailed report arrived in London. It put an end to the chances of Philippa of Schwedt. Although she was said to be handsome, it also described her as ‘d’une humeur opiniatre et peu prévenante’: ‘stubborn’ and ‘inconsiderate’ were not words George wanted to hear used about a prospective wife, and her name disappeared from his thinking. ‘I am under the greatest obligation to your brother,’ he told Munchausen. ‘What would I have risked if I had not hit upon so honest a man. I now abandon the idea.’ That left only the Princesses of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and Darmstadt. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was said to have a very good character, but Munchausen was still anxious that, having been raised in a very small, undistinguished court, she was too provincial to be seriously considered. The king’s own preference, at this point, was for Caroline of Darmstadt; if further reports on her were favourable, he confided to Bute that she would be his choice. Meanwhile, he continued to urge haste on everyone concerned. ‘The king’s longing and impatience increase daily,’ Munchausen told his brother, ‘and he has today calculated how long it will take for this letter to reach mon cher frère and for him to send an answer.’13

When the much-awaited dispatch arrived, it was a great disappointment. It had little positive to say about Caroline’s character, asserting that her own mother had described her ‘as stubborn and ill-tempered to the greatest degree’. The same report was, however, far more encouraging about the other candidate, ‘giving a very amiable character of the Princess of Strelitz’. George was encouraged, insisting that he did not share Munchausen’s anxieties about the limitations of her upbringing. It was her character that mattered to him, not her background. He told Bute that if she was as sensible as was reported, ‘a little of England’s air will soon give her the deportment necessary for a British queen’.14

The relaxed jocularity of George’s tone defined the attitude with which he set about the prosecution of what he called ‘my business’. Indeed, as the search for a spouse progressed, there is a definite sense in his correspondence that he was rather enjoying it. For such a timid and inexperienced man, the prospect of making an unhindered choice from a parade of marriageable young women, none of whom was likely to reject him, was clearly an attractive one. In the role of prospective husband, he found a new confidence, secure in his worth and in the power of his position. He had no difficulty in outlining the qualities necessary to satisfy him, nor in rejecting candidates who failed to live up to his very exacting requirements. As a spouse, he intended to be an altogether more assertive character than he had been as a son. In finding the partner he thought he deserved, he showed himself capable of making decisions with none of the anxiety or lethargy that had paralysed his actions in earlier life. This was an enterprise in which George did not intend to fail.

In the spring, the king’s search began to move towards a conclusion. In May, Caroline of Darmstadt was finally and decisively eliminated from his thinking, as disturbing new facts emerged about her family. The apparent piety of her father and his court had at first seemed attractive to George, who hoped his wife would share his own strong Christian convictions. But fresh information put a far darker complexion on the family’s spiritual pursuits. The king was horrified to learn that the Prince of Darmstadt had been drawn into the orbit of a group of religious visionaries who had driven him to the edge of reason. George had been told that these ‘visionnaires’ had ‘got about the princess’s father, have persuaded him to quit his family in great measure, lest the hereditary princess should prevent their strange schemes; they have brought the prince very near the borders of madness, and draw his money to that degree from him, that his children are often in want of necessaries such as stockings, etc.’. He had also discovered that ‘this princess was talked of last year’ for another prince, who had ‘refused her on account of her strange father and grandfather’.15 Was George prepared to take a risk another man had already declined?

He brooded for a fortnight, then on 20 May he wrote to Bute with his final decision: ‘The family of the Princess of Darmstadt has given me such melancholy thoughts of what may perhaps be in the blood.’ The possibility of madness was not an inheritance any ruler wanted to import into his bloodline, and put an end to the candidacy of Caroline of Darmstadt. As a result, the seventeen-year-old Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who had begun as a complete outsider – little more than a chance addition to Munchausen’s list – ended up bearing away the crown. ‘I trouble my Dearest Friend with the enclosed account of the Princess of Strelitz,’ wrote George. ‘I own it is not in every particular as I could wish, but yet I am resolved to fix here.’16

*

In the eighteenth century, Mecklenburg-Strelitz was considered very much a rural backwater. The duchy was then about the size of Sussex, and in the hierarchy of German princely states was in the second or perhaps even third division. Such was its reputation for mud and provinciality that it was sometimes referred to by heavy-handed contemporary jokers as ‘Mecklenburg-Strawlitter’. In 1736, when he was still Crown Prince of Prussia, Frederick the Great paid a surprise call on the Mecklenburg dukes, arriving unannounced at the family castle of Mirow. There was little evidence of the Prussian military discipline that reigned in Berlin. He wrote to his father that, ‘Coming on to the drawbridge, I perceived an old stocking-knitter disguised as a grenadier, with his cap, cartridge and musket laid aside so that they might not hinder his knitting.’ Gaining access to the castle proved a task in itself. ‘After knocking almost half an hour to no purpose, there peered out at last an exceedingly old woman. She was so terrified that she slammed the door in our faces.’ When Frederick finally met someone with enough self-possession to take him to the ducal family, he was promptly invited to dinner.

At the duke’s table, Frederick was surprised to see some of the ladies darning stockings during the meal.17 He was even more shocked to discover that sewing was not an activity confined to the female members of the family. The duke himself was a passionate devotee of needlework, said to embroider his own dressing gowns in his spare time, having achieved considerable skill in the art through years of practice. This was an eccentric pursuit for an aristocratic man (Frederick clearly thought it evidence of mild derangement) but neither the duke nor his relatives seemed embarrassed by it. On the contrary, over supper, madness formed the principal subject of discussion. ‘At table, there was talk of nothing but of all the German princes who are not right in their wits – as Mirow himself is reputed to be. There was Weimar, Gotha, Waldeck, Hoym and the whole lot brought on the carpet; and after our good host had got considerably drunk, he lovingly promised me that he and his whole family will come to visit me.’18 It was fortunate for George III’s future wife that none of these rumours reached the ears of the king, finely attuned as they were to any hint of inherited mental instability.

This was the world into which Princess Sophia Charlotte was born in 1744. The embroidering duke was her grandfather. Life was quiet for the Mecklenburg family in their compact palace, so small that Frederick had mistaken it for the parsonage. Charlotte had four brothers and an elder sister, Christiane (who at twenty-five was considered too old to be a wife for the twenty-two-year-old George III). Her father’s death, in 1752, when she was only eight, must have disturbed the placid passing of the days, but little else seems to have impacted on an early life distinguished by its lack of event. ‘The princess lived in the greatest retirement,’ one contemporary observer noted. ‘She dressed only in a robe de chambre, except on Sundays, on which day she put on her best gown and after service, which was very long, took an airing in a coach and six, attended by guards. She was not yet allowed to dine in public.’19 Charlotte’s mornings were devoted to the reigning family passion, sewing, in one of its many ornamental forms; she was inducted into the discipline of the needle very early, and never lost her taste for it when she was both older and grander. ‘Queen Charlotte, as we know, always had her piece of work in hand,’ recalled one of her more unctuous biographers. What had been in her grandfather adduced as possible evidence of insanity was regarded in Charlotte as an admirable demonstration of female industry. Her sewing skills, however, did not displace more academically minded pursuits. Charlotte’s mother took the education of her daughters seriously, and by the time Charlotte was seven she was already in the schoolroom. The sisters were instructed by Mme de Grabow, a poet whose local fame had earned her the title of ‘the German Sappho’.20 Besides teaching poetic composition and the rudiments of French – then considered an essential part of a polite education – Mme de Grabow also gave lessons in Latin. This was an unusual subject for girls: classical learning was generally considered the exclusive preserve of masculine study. Charlotte and Christiane were also taught theology by a Dr Gentzner, but the study of religion seems to have been secondary to his real passion, which was natural history. He was an accomplished botanist who awakened a similar enthusiasm in Charlotte. From her youth, she was a keen collector of plant specimens, preserving those she found most interesting in voluminous sketch books.

By the time she was in her early teens, Charlotte had already developed the bookish tastes that would stay with her for the rest of her life. She was a voracious reader, devouring serious works of literature, theology and philosophy; whatever she could beg, buy or borrow she would consume with an intensity that belied her otherwise docile demeanour. But her intellectual journeys were undertaken alone. The remoteness of Mecklenburg ensured she had no access to sophisticated thinking of the kind that had so stimulated Queen Caroline. Her parents were committed Lutherans who viewed with deep suspicion any form of study which sought to question the foundations of sacred truths. There was no Leibniz at the small, rural court to stretch her mind, and no protective cadre of like-minded, clever women to encourage her curiosity. Perhaps as a result of her intellectual isolation, Charlotte drew very different conclusions from her reading. Without the debate and provocation that had encouraged Caroline to explore unorthodox opinion, Charlotte’s values were unchallenged by what she read. Unlike Caroline, who was always suspected of harbouring suspiciously radical ideas about the truth of revealed religion, Charlotte’s intellectual explorations never undermined the traditional beliefs in which she had been so scrupulously raised. Her studies made her a bluestocking,21 but she was never a philosophe. While she immersed herself in the products of the Enlightenment, she did not endorse its implied social and political progressivism. She once returned a copy of one of Voltaire’s book to a correspondent, announcing primly: ‘I do not want anything more of his.’22

Her moral world remained that of her parents and grandparents, in which obligation was more important than personal happiness, and religion was the only meaningful expression of faith. She was a conservative, politically, morally and spiritually, most at ease in the confines of the established order, and unsettled by any attempts to undermine its power. These were qualities which would have appealed very strongly to George, who prized them in himself. Nor would he have been necessarily dismayed by her literary interests. It was not so much intellectual capacity itself which he distrusted in women, as the desire to give it a public, and above all a political, meaning. Charlotte never sought to build a reputation for herself as a clever woman; hers were private passions, pursued with decorous and entirely characteristic self-effacement. Indeed, when Colonel David Graeme, sent by the king to Mecklenburg to begin the formal negotiations for her hand, first met her he was underwhelmed by her accomplishments. He thought she spoke French ‘but middling well’, and was surprised that she had no knowledge at all of English. He saw too, as Munchausen had warned, she possessed little of the social polish that more urbane girls of her age and status could usually command. That Charlotte had talents, Graeme was sure; he just did not believe they had been fostered as they deserved. Only one of her skills truly impressed him: he was intrigued to discover that she had taught herself to play the glockenspiel, an instrument of which Graeme had never heard. It produced, he explained, ‘a bright and agreeable sound’.23

Two weeks after George had made his decision to ‘fix here’, he had instructed Graeme, a friend of Bute’s, to set out for the duchy, taking with him the formal offer of marriage. It was a slow journey, the roads ‘either overflowing with water or deep sand’, and it took Graeme more than a fortnight to get there. When he arrived, he was horrified to find that the widowed Duchess of Mecklenburg, to whom he had been told to explain his mission, was seriously ill. A series of ‘violent cramps’ had, he wrote to Bute, confined her to bed and ‘deprived her of speech’.24 Graeme carried with him a letter from the Dowager Princess Augusta, proposing her son as a husband for Charlotte. Unable to carry the document directly to the duchess, he entrusted it to Charlotte’s sister Christiane, who read it to her sick mother. When Graeme met the rest of the family at dinner later that night, it was plain that everyone now knew about the offer of marriage except the person most concerned by it. They had decided to tell Charlotte nothing, so that ‘by having no disturbance in her mind, she would converse more freely’, and Graeme could observe her natural behaviour. Unconscious of his scrutiny, Charlotte clearly acquitted herself well and some time after dinner was informed of the possible future that awaited her.

How she responded to this extraordinary announcement is not known. The story that she sat stoically silent, unmoved, without looking up from her sewing, is probably apocryphal. Her family were certainly far less restrained. They recognised what an unlooked-for opportunity had fallen into their laps, and were desperate to grasp it with both hands. Only Christiane must have found it hard to join in the general rejoicing. The terms of the marriage treaty forbade any other member of Charlotte’s family from marrying an English subject; having been thwarted in his own desire to marry ‘a countrywoman’, the king wanted no ambitious British in-laws intriguing from the sidelines. This put an abrupt end to Christiane’s romance with the Duke of Roxburghe, who had met her whilst travelling in Germany, and ‘had formed an attachment to her which was returned’.25 Unable to marry each other, neither Christiane nor the duke ever married anyone else. He dedicated his life to the collection of rare books; she became a cloistered royal spinster, an unacknowledged casualty of her younger sister’s marital good fortune.

Christiane’s fate registered not at all on the rest of the Mecklenburg family, who hastened to reply to a list of questions posed in Augusta’s letter. Alongside the formal declarations of the princess’s age, religion and availability – her brother eagerly confirmed that she was engaged to no one else – Graeme sent back to London a more intimate report of his own. Intended for the king’s eyes, this was in effect a candid, first-hand portrait of Charlotte. Inevitably, it began with an assessment of her looks. No one ever thought Charlotte a beauty, and throughout her life her supposed plainness was remorselessly and woundingly satirised. In middle age, she was depicted in cruel caricatures as a crow-like hag, or a bony, miserly witch, an emaciated spider, all arms, legs and chin. Even as a young woman, she was often described as plain and charmless. Recalling her first arrival in England, the diarist Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie, thought Charlotte presented a very unappealing figure: ‘She was very ill-dressed, and wore neither rouge nor powder … her hair used to be combed tight over a roller, which showed the skin through the roots, than which nothing can be more frightful.’26

Graeme’s pen portrait of her was more kind. She was very slender, he wrote, and of medium height; her complexion was ‘delicate and fine, with an abundance of red, not to be called a high bloom but as much as, in my opinion, there should be at her age, and sufficient to relieve the lustre of a very fine white’. Her hair, one of her best features, was a pale brown. Her nose was acceptable in shape and size, but her mouth, later to attract the delighted attention of the caricaturists, was, he admitted, ‘rather large’. She had a little growing still to do. She was just seventeen, and ‘the appearance of her person is not quite that of a woman fully formed, nor may it be expected at her age, though the bosom is full enough for her age and person’. She was, he had been told, healthy, and carried herself well, ‘the whole figure straight, genteel and easy, all her actions and carriage natural and unaffected’. In conclusion, he declared, as so many others were to later do, that ‘she is not a beauty’, but ‘what is little inferior, she is amiable, and her face rather agreeable than otherwise’.27

If Graeme was cautious in his careful evaluation of Charlotte’s looks, he was far more effusive in his description of her character. The more time he spent with her, the more he grew to like her. He warmed to her artlessness, and was delighted when she sent him a bowl of cherries as a present. When her sick mother died only days after the marriage offer had been received, Graeme was moved by Charlotte’s ‘flowing tears’; she confided in him that the duchess’s last words had been a wish for her happiness, and declared herself ready ‘to render herself worthy of that station … before tears again stopped her utterance’. Throughout her grief, he noted with approval, she showed ‘not the least spark of hauteur’. Her unworldly rectitude amused him. He was amazed to discover with what detail she had researched the services of the Anglican Church before solemnly assuring him that she would have no difficulty in conforming to them. He could not imagine that she could be so seriously attached to ‘some inessential points’ that they would prevent her ‘paving the way to a throne’.28

If she was sometimes guilty of taking herself too seriously, this was not the dominant note in her character; as a young woman, Charlotte was lively and even playful in company. Lord Harcourt admitted that ‘our queen that is to be’ had seen very little of the world, but thought she demonstrated qualities more important than those of sophistication and experience. ‘Her good sense, vivacity and cheerfulness, I daresay will recommend her to the king and to the whole British nation.’29 Charlotte certainly demonstrated a fervent desire to win the approval of both her future husband and her prospective subjects. When the British navy won a victory in the West Indies in July 1761, she wrote enthusiastically to Graeme, describing how she and her sister had danced till midnight to celebrate. Her feelings, she wrote, were exactly those that the wife of the King of Great Britain should be, sharing in the happiness of not just the king himself, ‘but of all his worthy nation … there are times when the heart speaks, and this is how my heart feels this morning’. Graeme forwarded her letter to Bute as proof of her ‘frank open heart’, adding his hope that ‘her good humour and good spirits’ should never ‘suffer any interruption or change’.30

For others, it was her calm good temper that attracted most plaudits. Munchausen, to whom more than anyone she owed her good fortune, was struck by the sweetness of her disposition, if not the polish and sparkle of her conversation. ‘It cannot be pretended she should entertain people in a brilliant manner,’ he observed, ‘but she is gracious and kind to everyone.’ He noticed that her servants and entourage adored her and that ‘never since her tenderest childhood did she arouse in anyone the slightest ill humour’.31 Charlotte’s marriage prospects had plucked her from obscurity and made her an object of political interest to other European states. Baron Wrangel, a Swedish diplomat reporting on her to his government, painted a similar picture of placid good temper and innocence. ‘She has a good and generous heart … but no idea of the value of money.’ She spent a lot of her time with servants, and was unguarded in her conversations with them, a fact that might, he thought, be used to gather intelligence about her; but she was not herself either a strategist or schemer. ‘She has no knowledge of politics, and no idea of intrigues, or of the interests of princes.’ That, he believed, was one of the reasons she had been chosen, since ‘she will never involve Britain in the affairs of the Continent’.32 To some extent, Wrangel was correct in his analysis. The relative insignificance of Mecklenburg meant that in marrying one of its princesses, George was unlikely to become embroiled in the complicated pattern of alliance and dispute that dominated relationships between the larger and more powerful German princely states.

But it was Charlotte’s character as much as her dynastic neutrality that consolidated her appeal for the king. It was her simplicity, upon which all who met her commented with such approval, her lack of sophistication, of contention or wilfulness, that commended her most strongly to Graeme and, through his reports, to her future husband. Young, inexperienced, untutored in the ways of courts or politics, her naivety emerged not as the disadvantage Munchausen had feared, but as her most powerfully attractive quality, an enticingly blank page for a man to write upon. She was ‘mild’, ‘soft and pliable’, Graeme enthused, ‘capable of taking any impression, of being moulded into any form’.33 Little similar flexibility was to be expected from her husband, who saw himself as the secure stake around which his wife would twine. George would supply the worldly judgement and direction their relationship would require; he did not hope or wish to find such qualities in his wife. Charlotte’s lack of looks, money, sophistication and influence counted for nothing; on the contrary, they amplified the key promise of her pliability – and it was that which ultimately secured her the crown.

‘The more I resolve in my mind the affair, the more I wish to have it immediately concluded,’ wrote George to Bute at the end of June. Now he had made his choice, he was impatient to be married; but he was also keen to spare his bride the prospect of having to face both coronation and wedding services in intimidating succession. The coronation was planned for September. He hoped Charlotte could arrive in London a month beforehand, allowing time for the wedding and a short honeymoon. With no time to lose, the machinery of government and protocol was put in motion, and the Privy Council was summoned to meet on 8 July. When they assembled, they were informed of the king’s intention ‘to demand in marriage the Princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a princess distinguished by every eminent virtue and amiable endowment’. This was the meeting that so shocked Henry Fox and put an abrupt end to Sarah Lennox’s royal romance. It caught even the unflappable Walpole by surprise, and as a result he had only the baldest news about the impending nuptials to pass on to his extensive network of correspondents. ‘All I can tell you of truth is that Lord Harcourt goes to fetch the princess and comes back as her Master of the Horse. She is to be here in August, and the coronation on the 22nd September.’34

The choice of Lord Harcourt as the official charged with negotiating the marriage treaty, and bringing Charlotte to her new home in England, was surprising – Harcourt himself confessed that ‘this office I expected about as much as I did the Bishopric of London, then vacant’. His last contact with the king had been as his louche and ineffectual governor, when George was Prince of Wales. It was Harcourt who had so successfully and infuriatingly given the dowager princess the repeated brush-off, despite all her persistent attempts to pin him down and find out exactly what he was doing with her son. It was a mystery to everyone why George had chosen him, but somehow fitting that the appointment seems to have arisen from what Harcourt had not done rather than as the result of some more positive action. The king was said to have told Harcourt that as he was the only man not to have solicited him for a place when he inherited the throne, he had always had it in mind to do something for him. It was definitely a plum of a job; Harcourt was given the title Master of the Horse to the new queen’s household, and was granted the huge sum of £4,000 to pay for his trip.

He arrived in Strelitz on 14 July. The next day, final details were agreed and the marriage treaty was ‘despatched away to England’. Harcourt was pleased to see how hard the ducal family had exerted themselves to mark the occasion and was particularly impressed by a grand banquet, held the night the treaty was signed. The palace and gardens were lit with 40,000 lamps; even the small town of Neustrelitz illuminated its lanes and backstreets to celebrate. To conclude the event, Charlotte made a speech of thanks which ended with a formal leave-taking of her family. It ‘so forcibly impressed many of the bystanders that their wet cheeks could only tell what they felt’. Colonel Graeme – who was among the damp-eyed spectators – was moved to uncharacteristic emotion, writing to Bute that he was convinced ‘no marriage can afford a greater prospect of happiness’.35 When the day came to leave, Charlotte departed in great style. Lord Harcourt’s carriage led the way, followed by Charlotte’s; in the third carriage came ‘the ladies’, including two ‘femmes des chambres’, Juliana Schwellenberg and Johanna Hagerdorn. George had been reluctant to allow Charlotte to bring any of her old servants with her to England. ‘I own I hope they will be quiet people,’ he told Bute gloomily, ‘for by my own experience I have seen these women meddle much more than they ought to do.’36

Back in London, the king’s enthusiasm mounted daily. He had acquired a portrait of Charlotte and was said to be ‘mighty fond of it, but won’t let any mortal look at it’.37 Although George had little interest in fashion, he concerned himself in the provision of a suitable wardrobe for his bride. ‘Graeme ought to get a very exact measure of her,’ he told Bute, ‘accompanied with a very explicit account of every particular, that her clothes may be made here.’38 He knew that the styles of a remote German court would not survive the critical scrutiny of the London beau monde. The usual method of ordering clothes by proxy was to send one’s stays to the dressmaker, who would use them as a form of measurement, but such was the austerity of Charlotte’s upbringing that she had only a single pair, which clearly could not be spared. Graeme sent her measurements instead, passing them on to Lady Bute, who was to ensure that new gowns – and presumably a few extra pairs of stays – would be waiting for Charlotte when she arrived in England.

The atmosphere of apprehension and excitement in London had reached fever pitch well before Charlotte had even set out from Mecklenburg. The announcement of the royal wedding had been followed by news of a great victory in India, where the British and French were contesting for supremacy in the subcontinent. The capture of Pondicherry, the principal French base in the south, marked a decisive upturn in British fortunes, and had inflamed the national mood of manic self-congratulation even further. Even the usually detached Walpole was caught up in the celebratory atmosphere. ‘I don’t know where I am,’ he confessed. ‘It is all royal marriages, coronations and victories; they come tumbling so over one another from distant parts of the globe that it looks just like the handiwork of a lady romance writer to whom it costs nothing but a little false geography to make the Great Mogul fall in love with a Princess of Mecklenburg and defeat two marshals of France as he rides post on an elephant to his nuptials.’39

The man at the centre of the mounting excitement sought to sublimate his eager impatience into practical organisation. George began to assemble the Hanoverian family jewels so they could be worn by his new wife, paying his uncle the Duke of Cumberland £50,000 to buy out Cumberland’s share of his inheritance. The result was a collection of extraordinary richness. At the end of July, the Duchess of Northumberland was granted a discreet opportunity to examine it by Lady Bute, who had temporary custody of it, presumably in her role as the overseer of Charlotte’s trousseau. The duchess, a wealthy woman well supplied with jewels of her own, was astonished by what she saw. ‘There are an amazing number of pearls of a most beautiful colour and prodigious size. There are diamonds for the facings and robings of her gown, set in sprigs of flowers; her earrings are three drops, the diamonds of an immense size and fine water. The necklace consists of large brilliants set around … The middle drop of the earring costs £12,000.’40

George also appointed a household for his wife-to-be, a substantial establishment that included six Ladies of the Bedchamber, six Maids of Honour and six lower-ranking waiting women. The future queen was also provided with chamberlains, pages, gentleman ushers, surgeons, apothecaries, ‘an operator for teeth’ and two ‘necessary women’. As well as a Master of the Horse, other staff included a treasurer, law officers and her own band of German musicians. At the top of this structure, he placed two intimidating women: the Duchess of Ancaster was to be Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Hamilton, Lady of the Bedchamber. Both were experienced beauties, veterans of court life, worldly sophisticates who might not have been the obvious choices to reassure and support a callow seventeen-year-old on her first arrival in a strange country; they were, in effect, Charlotte’s introduction to the female world in which she would now be expected to make a life for herself, for the king had charged them with the task of crossing the Channel and accompanying the future queen home. Neither duchess was very happy about the idea, and neither proved the easiest of passengers. The Duchess of Hamilton insisted that her tame ass should accompany her on the journey, so that she should not be deprived of the medicinal benefits of its milk. ‘The Duchess of Ancaster,’ Walpole noted, ‘only takes a surgeon and a midwife, as she is breeding and subject to hysteric fits.’41

The fleet assembled to carry the reluctant duchesses across to Germany sailed from Harwich and arrived at the mouth of the Elbe on 14 August 1761. On the 22nd, Charlotte was ready to embark. She had no experience of the sea – indeed, she had probably never seen it before – and therefore little idea what to expect on her journey. Her first voyage turned out to be anything but a smooth one. The weather was bad from the beginning, with gales, rain and thunder making the small fleet’s progress slow and haphazard. As the days went on with no sign of the English coast, the discomfort of the journey took its toll, and the duchesses were soon observed ‘to be very much out of order’; however, a very different story was told of Charlotte’s response to the ordeal.42 ‘The queen was not at all affected with the storm, but bore the sea like a truly British queen,’ gushed one contemporary press account; Walpole heard that she had been ‘sick but half an hour; sung and played on the harpsichord all the voyage, and been cheerful the whole time’.43

In reality, Charlotte seems to have found the voyage just as prostrating as all the other passengers. When Lord Anson, who captained the Royal Charlotte, finally arrived in Harwich on 7 September, he wrote immediately to the Admiralty explaining that ‘the princess being much fatigued made it absolutely necessary to land her royal highness here’, and plans for a triumphal procession up the Thames to London were quietly abandoned. From Harwich she travelled to Colchester, where she was presented with a gift of candied eringo root – a kind of sea holly – which must have given her a rather strange idea of what was considered a delicacy in her new homeland. She spent the night at the home of Lord Abercorn in Witham, where she ate her first formal English dinner, with Lord Harcourt standing on one side of her chair and Lord Anson on the other, and the door ‘wide open, that everybody might have the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing her’.44

After that, it was onwards to London, to St James’s Palace and her destiny. The marriage ceremony was to take place that very evening. No wonder that, as her destination approached, she had little to say. ‘When she caught the first glimpse of the palace, she grew frightened and turned pale; the Duchess of Hamilton smiled – the princess said, “My dear Duchess, you may laugh, you have been married twice but it is no joke to me.”’45

There was little time for reflection. As soon as her arrival in town had been confirmed, all the city’s pent-up desire for celebration exploded into a cacophony of sound. ‘Madame Charlotte is this instant arrived!’ scribbled Walpole as a delighted postscript to one of his omnipresent letters. ‘The noise of coaches, chaises, horsemen, mob that have been to see her pass through the parks is so prodigious that I cannot distinguish the guns. I am going to be dressed, and before seven shall launch into the crowd. Pray for me!’46 Walpole was not the only well-connected spectator determined to satisfy his curiosity. Everyone wanted to see the first meeting of the king and the princess. The Countess of Harrington watched it from over her garden wall, and passed on what she had seen to the Countess of Kildare, who in turn described it to her husband. Introduced to the king, Charlotte ‘threw herself at his feet, he raised her up, embraced her and led her through the garden up the steps into the palace’.47

Some later reminiscences asserted that at the moment of their meeting, the king had been shocked by Charlotte’s appearance. ‘At the first sight of the German princess,’ wrote one particularly hostile commentator, ‘the king actually shrank from her gaze, for her countenance was of that cast that too plainly told of the nature of the spirit working within.’48 Yet there is no suggestion in any contemporary account that George was disappointed in what he saw. Walpole, never disposed to be charitable, described Charlotte on first seeing her as ‘sensible, cheerful and … remarkably genteel’.49

After the formal greetings, George led Charlotte into St James’s to present her to his family. In pride of place was his mother Augusta; also present were his three sisters and three brothers, and his uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, welcomed back into the family now that his nephew sat securely on his throne. Charlotte was conducted to a lavish dinner which included partridges stuffed with truffles, venison in pastry, and sweetbreads. While the royals ate, the court began to assemble in preparation for the wedding ceremony. Most, including Walpole and the Duchess of Northumberland, arrived at around seven o’clock. They had a long wait, on an exceptionally hot evening.

‘The night was sultry,’ wrote Walpole, dashing off his impressions of the event. ‘About ten, the procession began to move towards the chapel and at eleven they all came into the Drawing Room.’50 Then Charlotte appeared for the first time in a public role in England, dressed in an elaborate wedding gown which was subjected to a scrutiny almost as intense as that directed upon her looks. The dress was made of silver tissue, trimmed with silver and covered with diamonds, set off with a little cap of purple velvet. But for all its magnificence, Charlotte’s outfit was a very poor fit; clearly, the measurements sent across from Mecklenburg had proved no substitute for the more accurate sizing that stays would have provided. The dress, burdened with heavy jewels, was far too large for Charlotte’s slender frame. It was of course Walpole who recorded that her ‘violet velvet mantle … which was attempted to be fastened on her shoulders by a bunch of pearls dragged itself and almost the rest of her clothes halfway down her waist’.51 The unhappy result was that ‘the spectators knew as much of her upper half as the king himself’.52

Struggling with her clothes, the princess was led by the Duke of York through the assembled crowd of courtiers towards the chapel where the wedding was to take place. As she made her way, her nerve began to fail her and her hands shook. ‘Courage, Princess, courage,’ urged the duke.53 An even more intimidating experience followed, as she was plunged into a heaving rout of intensely curious strangers. She had enough self-possession to kiss the peeresses, as etiquette demanded, but Lady Augusta, the king’s sister, was ‘forced to take her hand and give it to those who were to kiss it’.54

In a reversal of tradition, protocol demanded that the princess arrive first at the altar and wait for the king. When he entered, the service began. It was conducted in English, as George had required. The Archbishop of Canterbury later remembered: ‘I called on him and the queen only by their Christian names. When I asked them the proper question, the king answered solemnly, laying his hand on his breast, and suggested to her to answer, “Ich will,” which she did: but spoke audibly in no other part of the service.’55 The marriage began as it was to continue, with George instructing his wife while she remained silent.

‘The instant the king put on the ring,’ reported the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘a rocket was let fly from the top of the chapel as a signal for the discharge of the Park and Tower guns, which were immediately fired.’ The princess had rallied somewhat. ‘She talks a great deal,’ observed Walpole, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ Her French, he thought, was only ‘tolerable’ but ‘she exchanged much of that, and also of German, with the king and the Duke of York’.56 She was also able to display her other accomplishments. ‘The royal supper not being ready, the queen (at the king’s request) played very prettily on the harpsichord,’ and sang to the assembled family, who did not, the duchess had been told, ‘get to bed till three in the morning’.57

To Charlotte, brought up in the staid uneventfulness of Mecklenburg, the day must have seemed as if it would never end. At its close, however, she was spared the ordeal endured by Augusta, her new mother-in-law, and other princesses before her. When she and the king entered their bedroom, they did so alone, and closed the door behind them. Their marriage was undeniably a public event, but what happened afterwards was private, with none of the public ribaldry that had accompanied George’s parents on their wedding night. Walpole heard that the abandonment of the old rituals had been at Charlotte’s insistence. ‘The queen was very averse to going to bed, and at last articled that no one should retire with her but the Princess of Wales, and her two German women, and that no one should be admitted afterwards but the king.’ When the dowager princess returned from the couple’s bedchamber, she asked the Duke of Cumberland to sit with her for a while. The duke was tired and tetchy, and refused with bad grace. ‘What should I stay for?’ he demanded. ‘If she cries out, I cannot help her.’58

Later, George and Charlotte were to find it much harder to navigate their way through the imprecise distinctions between the two dimensions of royal life – that which they inhabited as man and wife, and that which they occupied as king and queen – but the privacy of their first night together was a declaration of the optimism with which the pair entered the marriage state. Their union would not be like those of their predecessors: it would start in the way it was meant to go on – as a genuine partnership, forged in private intimacy.

*

The day after the wedding, Charlotte was presented at an official Drawing Room, designed to introduce her to the great and the good of the court. Walpole thought that George seemed in great spirits and delighted with his wife, talking to her ‘continually, with the greatest good humour. It does not promise,’ he noted with rare generosity, ‘as if they two would be the most unhappy persons in England, from this event.’59 A celebration ball was held that night where, according to the Duchess of Northumberland, ‘everything was vastly well conducted; nor was it too hot, notwithstanding there were a vast many people, all very magnificently dressed’. In the midst of the minuets and country dances, the duchess was touched to see the king doing all he could to please his new wife. ‘His Majesty this evening showed the most engaging attention towards the queen, even the taking of snuff (of which Her Majesty is very fond) which he detests and it made him sneeze prodigiously.’60 At a second Drawing Room the following day, the duchess heard from George himself how very pleased he was. ‘The king this day did me the honour to tell me that he thought himself too happy.’61

Gradually, Charlotte began to relax a little. Even the news that the aged, half-blind, Jacobite Earl of Westmorland had mistaken Sarah Lennox for the queen and tried to kiss her hand in error did not cast a pall over the proceedings. Sarah had pulled back her hand in horror, declaring, ‘I am not the queen, sir!’ ‘No,’ declared one wit, ‘she is only the Pretender.’

None of this seems to have disturbed Charlotte’s increasing assurance. She was even confident enough to turn a small social embarrassment into a mild joke. As the Duchess of Northumberland and other ladies ‘attended Her Majesty back to her dressing room, her train caught the fender and drew it into the middle of the room. I disengaged her. She laughed very heartily and told me a droll story of the Princess of Prussia having drawn a lighted billet out of the chimney and carrying it through the apartment, firing the mat all the way.’62

‘You don’t presume to suppose, I hope,’ wrote Walpole to a distant correspondent a few days after the wedding, ‘that we are thinking of you, and wars and misfortunes and distresses in these festival times. Mr Pitt himself would be mobbed if he talked of anything but clothes and diamonds and bridesmaids.’63 With the first round of ceremonies over, the royal couple spent a few days taking trips to Richmond and Kew. They clearly enjoyed themselves, since they were to return in later life, spending many summers at Kew, and establishing their growing family there, in what was regarded as a healthy rural outpost of London.

While they admired the views of the Thames, and the gardens William Kent had designed for George’s grandmother Queen Caroline, elsewhere the preparations for the coronation continued apace. Walpole, whose appetite for royal ceremony was all but sated, complained of ‘the gabble one heard about it for six weeks before’, and referred to the whole event as ‘a puppet show’, but could not entirely divorce himself from the rising tide of excitement. ‘If I was to entitle ages, I would call this the century of crowds,’ he mused as people from across the country began to flood into London.64

*

Coronation Day began early. The Duchess of Northumberland ‘rose at half past four, went to the queen’s apartment at Westminster’. There she found Charlotte, once more weighed down with jewels, dressed with stiff formality complete with mother-of-pearl fan, but with her hair worn girlishly loose, discreetly supplemented with ‘coronation locks’, a false hair piece that had cost six guineas.65

The event opened with a procession from Westminster Hall to the abbey. When George and Charlotte arrived at the abbey door it was immediately clear that the ceremony promised to be just as chaotic as the late king’s funeral. From the outset, nothing ran to plan, or to time. Many key props were missing: ‘In the morning, they had forgot the sword of state, the chairs for the king and queen and their canopies.’ When the king complained about the poor management, the Earl Marshal, who was responsible for organising the day, promised him solemnly that ‘the next coronation would be regulated in the most exact manner imaginable’.66 Gradually, however, things began to fall into place. At the abbey, the king’s entry was greeted by the choir of Westminster School, who sang ‘Vivat Regina Charlotte!’ and ‘Vivat Georgius Rex!’ ‘There was all sorts of music,’ enthused one spectator, who had travelled down from Yorkshire for the day. ‘It was a grand sound.’67

Alongside the nobility and courtiers, the abbey was packed with more ordinary visitors who had squeezed themselves into its precincts with the settled intention of enjoying every moment of what promised to be a long and satisfying day. One of those was the young William Hickey, whose father, a prosperous City lawyer, ‘had engaged one of the nunneries, as they are called, in Westminster Abbey, for which he paid fifty guineas’.68 The Hickey family was stationed in a panelled bolt-hole right up in the roof, from which they commanded ‘an admirable view of the whole interior of the building’. They had anticipated the affair would be a long one, and had therefore arrived properly prepared. ‘Provisions, consisting of cold fowls, ham, tongues, different meat pies, wines and liquors of various sorts were sent into the apartment the day before, and two servants were allowed to attend.’ The twelve-strong party had found it an ordeal just getting to the abbey at all. ‘Opposite the Horse Guards, we were stopped exactly an hour without moving a single inch. As we approached the abbey, the difficulties increased.’ Crushed together by the crowds, coaches were constantly ‘running against each other, whereby glasses and panels were demolished without number, the noise of which, accompanied by the screeches of the terrified ladies, was at times truly terrific’. The Hickey family took six hours to get to their niche, where they were glad to find ‘a hot and comfortable breakfast waiting for us all’.

Some five hours later, at one o’clock, the king and queen at last arrived. Hickey had ‘a capital view’ of the actual crowning, but like almost everyone else in the abbey, he could not hear a word of what the archbishop was saying, and so decided that this was the perfect opportunity to enjoy lunch. ‘As many thousands were out of the possibility of hearing a single syllable, they took that opportunity to eat their meal, when the general clattering of knives, forks, plates and glasses that ensued, produced a most ridiculous effect, and a universal bout of laughter followed.’69

Whatever else had been overlooked, some provision had been made for the more basic needs of the ceremony’s principal players. For Walpole, ‘of all the incidents of the day, perhaps the most diverting was what happened to the queen. She had a retiring chamber, with all the conveniences, prepared behind the altar. She went thither – in the most convenient, what found she but – the Duke of Newcastle!’70 After about five hours, the coronation was finally over. The procession assembled again and, at about six o’clock, marched back to Westminster Hall for the banquet. The Duchess of Northumberland found the walk back through the dark and cold extremely trying. She was impatient for a meal, which she felt was now long overdue. ‘No dinner to eat … instead of profusion of geese etc., not wherewithal to fill one’s belly.’71 The coronation’s organisers had planned the long delays as a prelude to a gesture intended to amaze the guests as they re-entered Westminster Hall. More than 3,000 candles had been suspended from the ceiling of the hall; they were designed to be illuminated instantly by a complicated system of flax tapers, but the whole enterprise almost ended in disaster. The poet Thomas Gray, who was sitting in the hall, described how ‘the instant the queen’s canopy entered, fire was given to all the lustres at once by trains of prepared flax, that reached from one to another’; then, ‘it rained fire upon the heads of nearly all the spectators (the flax falling in large flakes) and the ladies (queen and all) were in no small terrors’.72

As the guests brushed the charred remnants of flax out of their clothes and hair, there was plenty to distract them. The banquet finally arrived – three services of over a hundred dishes – and the royal party devoted themselves to their food. Gray noticed that the king and queen ‘both eat like farmers’, as they tucked into the venison served to them on gold plates. As nothing had been provided for the many spectators to eat, baskets and knotted handkerchiefs were lowered from the crowded balconies, and heaved back up weighted down with cold chickens or bottles of wine. For the second time during the Coronation Day, the event had turned into an informal shared feast.

When the banquet was over, the king and queen returned to St James’s Palace to share a prosaic supper of bread and milk with a little gruel. There seems little doubt they did so with quiet, unaffected relief. In the previous few weeks, Charlotte had acquitted herself as well as anyone could expect. She had travelled across Europe to marry a stranger, and found him to be neither cold prig nor louche debauchee, but instead a serious, steady young man who had so far treated her with nothing but respectful affection. He, for his part, had found for himself a woman who, if she was neither a great beauty nor overburdened with fashionable accomplishments, had so far displayed a gratifying willingness to admire, esteem and obey him. No wonder the king was pleased.

In early September, when Charlotte, as yet unseen by him, was still crossing the turbulent North Sea, George had written hopefully to Bute, ‘I now think my domestic happiness [is] in my own power.’73 Now that the idea of a wife had turned into the reality of Charlotte, he was even more confident that married life, so long anticipated, would deliver everything he expected from it.

CHAPTER 5
A Modern Marriage

THE CARE WITH WHICH GEORGE had chosen his wife was a measure of the optimism with which he viewed the prospects for his marriage. He had always intended that it should be more than a purely dynastic union. Unlike so many of his royal predecessors, he was determined to find within it a personal happiness which would enrich and transform his private life. But he also hoped that his relationship with his new queen would have a public meaning too. It was central to his mission as king to set an example of virtuous behaviour that could inspire his subjects to replicate it in their own lives. The conduct of his marriage would be the strongest possible declaration of the principles in which he believed, a beacon of right-thinking and good practice which would illustrate in the most personal way what could be achieved when consideration, kindness and respect were established at the heart of the conjugal experience. In pursuing this ideal, George was not alone. Many other young couples of his generation sought to find in their marriages the qualities of affection and loyalty the king set out to achieve in his own partnership. In his attitude to this most important relationship, George was perhaps less royally unique and more reflective of the aspirations of many of his subjects than in almost any other dimension of his life.

This was not, however, always apparent in the marital practices of those closest to the king in social status. Among the upper reaches of the aristocracy, instances abounded of married couples displaying spectacular and well-publicised indifference to any of the established standards of moral probity. Plutocratic levels of wealth and a blithe sense of entitlement fostered a serene disregard for the marital conventions that regulated the actions of poorer, smaller people. The great aristocrats made their own rules. Lady Harley, the Countess of Oxford, had so many children by so many different lovers that her brood was dubbed the Harleian Miscellany, after the famous collection of antiquarian books. Her husband was unperturbed by her affairs, declaring that he found her ‘frank candour’ to be ‘so amiable’ that he entirely forgave her.1 In the Pembroke marriage, it was the earl who was the unfaithful partner, eloping with his mistress but sending the baby boy produced by the liaison back to the family home, where he was affectionately cared for by Pembroke’s much-tried countess.

A higher-profile example of marital conventions turned upside down was the talk of the country for most of its thirty-year duration. The relationship between the 5th Duke of Devonshire and his duchess, Georgiana, was a crowded one by any standards, including not only the ducal husband and wife but also Elizabeth Foster, who joined the Devonshire household as the duchess’s best friend – some said lover – and eventually came to preside over it as the duke’s acknowledged mistress, the mother of two of his children and, after Georgiana’s death, his second wife. Unlike the long-suffering Lady Pembroke, who Horace Walpole thought had all the purity of a Madonna, Georgiana pursued her own relationships, most notably with the politician Charles Grey, by whom she had a daughter. The baby was raised by Grey’s parents, but Georgiana’s legitimate children were brought up at Chatsworth alongside those of her husband and his mistress.

For all its very public indifference to accepted standards, the Devonshire marriage came to an end in the traditional way, with the death of one of the partners. This was not the case with a relationship whose noisy dissolution scandalised a mesmerised public, and seemed to some outraged observers to have rewarded bad behaviour on all sides. The union of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton was a typical elite match. Augustus Fitzroy was heir to the Grafton dukedom; Anne Liddell was a rich man’s daughter who brought a huge dowry of £40,000 to her new husband. It looked as though money had been the prime consideration in arranging the marriage, but the duchess claimed that she and the duke had been very much in love when first married in 1756. Whatever had brought them together, the Graftons were not happy for long. The duchess was soon complaining of the duke’s gambling, drinking and adultery, and, perhaps hoping to shock him into better behaviour, she left him and retreated to her father’s house. It proved a huge miscalculation on her part. Grafton immediately took up with Nancy Parsons, described by Horace Walpole as ‘a girl distinguished by a most uncommon degree of prostitution’, who was said to have earned a hundred guineas in a single week ‘from different lovers, at a guinea a head’.2 The duchess asked for, and received, a formal separation, whereupon the duke installed Nancy Parsons in her rooms and allowed her to wear the duchess’s jewels and preside over her dinner table.

As a separated woman, only the most unimpeachable conduct would have shored up the duchess’s tottering reputation; but she was only twenty-eight in 1765, and perhaps felt it was a little early to retire from the world, especially given the humiliating way in which she had been replaced by Nancy Parsons. Soon her ‘flirtations’ were the subject of disapproving gossip. She dallied with the Duke of Portland, who married someone else without telling her first. Then, in 1767, she met the Earl of Ossory at Brighton. They began an affair, and she found herself pregnant with his child. Despite his own well-publicised adultery, Grafton was outraged; perhaps his recent appointment as first minister had hardened his usually fluid moral resolve. He prosecuted the duchess for adultery and won. She was persuaded not to counter-sue in return for a generous allowance, and her agreement to hand over into Grafton’s care the children from their marriage, who were taken from her as she lay in bed about to give birth to Ossory’s baby. The Graftons were divorced by an Act of Parliament in 1769; three days later, the duchess married Ossory.

It was this last chapter in the duchess’s chequered story that provoked most disapproval from guardians of conventional values. Princess Amelia, George II’s plain-speaking spinster daughter, observed grimly that ‘the frequency of these things amongst people of the highest rank had become a reproach to the nation’. She particularly objected to the duchess’s remarriage, as it suggested that an adulterous affair could be transformed, via the agency of divorce, into a state of respectable matrimony. Princess Amelia was not the only member of the royal family who disapproved, especially when the reputation to be washed clean was that of the woman involved. The courtier and diarist Lady Mary Coke overheard the king ask the Lord Chancellor, the country’s most senior legal officer, whether ‘something might be thought of that would prevent the very bad conduct of the ladies, of which there had been very many instances lately’. Later she heard a rumour that ‘His Majesty proposed a bill should be brought in, to prevent ladies divorced from their husbands from marrying again’.3

In the event, nothing more was heard of the king’s desire to enforce female fidelity through parliamentary legislation, but George did all he could, by every other means at his disposal, to signal his distaste for the brittle, serial immorality practised so flamboyantly by so many of his loose-living aristocratic peers. The image of the worldly, sophisticated womaniser who took his pleasure with insouciant disregard for his marriage vows had been extremely attractive to George’s father and grandfather, both of whom believed that their masculinity was enhanced by the tang of a little adultery; but George was immune to its appeal. He conformed to a very different eighteenth-century type, and, as a result, looked towards a very different vision of the married state. As the historian Amanda Vickery has shown, not all eighteenth-century men were amoral pleasure-seekers, drawing their gratification from the bottle, the hunt or the gaming table, believing, as Horace Walpole wrote of the Duke of Grafton, that ‘the world should be postponed for a whore and a horse-race’.4

For many sober, conscientious, diligent young men, it was not through such expensive and ephemeral amusements that they hoped to establish their identity and position in the world; it was marriage with some respectable young woman which would allow them truly to come into their own and make their way in life. Marriage was not a burden to be endured, a restraint to be kicked against, but a prize towards which they endlessly planned and schemed. ‘My imagination was excited with pleasurable ideas of what was coming,’ wrote one eager groom for whom the longed-for day was at last in sight; ‘There was not one thing on earth which gave me the slightest anxiety or doubt! Nothing but a delightful anticipation of happiness and independence!’5 The yearning to find the right wife, with whom they could establish a home and raise a family, was, for men like these, an all-consuming desire, its achievement a source of lasting satisfaction.

Their outlook was one with which George III instinctively identified. He was socially conservative, sexually restrained, dutiful, exacting and often painfully self-aware. He was also loyal, decent and hungry for emotional warmth, if supplied on his own terms, and by a woman who would not intimidate or overwhelm him. The template towards which he was drawn, both by his character and his sense of his public mission, placed wedlock at the very pinnacle of human emotional experience. ‘This state,’ wrote the clergyman Wetenhall Wilkes in a bestselling pamphlet first published in 1741, and still in print when George and Charlotte were married twenty years later, ‘is the completest image of heaven we can ever receive in this life, productive of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy on this earth.’6

This was a vision of matrimony in which, whilst considerations of property and money were not ignored, it was the harmony of the couple at its centre that mattered most. It was a union into which both partners entered willingly, with an equal commitment to making it work, a marital joint-enterprise in which husband and wife were both prepared to sacrifice individual needs and desires in order to secure the success of the wider family project. Both were prepared to involve themselves in the interests of the other, since shared tastes and mutually satisfying pursuits were considered to be the strongest bedrock upon which a happy marriage rested. Inside the partnership, the most propitious emotional climate was considered to be one of steady affection rather than volcanic eruptions of feeling. A firm endeavour to please was thought more significant than physical attraction, and generosity of spirit and mildness of temper most important of all.

The degree to which this model of matrimony – once dubbed by academics ‘the companionate marriage’ – was a new phenomenon which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century has been one of the most hotly contested debates in social history in recent years. Little credence is now given to the once widely accepted assertion that, before this date, most marriages were cold, commercial contracts, dominated by financial considerations, arranged by parents, and with little room within their bounds for affection. Nor is it now generally accepted that after about 1750 there was a universal warming up of the married state, with love becoming the principal basis for entering into wedlock. But whilst, in practice, marriage continued to contain within itself examples of success and failure, the concern to get things right, to try to identify the best possible preconditions for a stable and lasting relationship, was an obsessive preoccupation of many eighteenth-century writers, thinkers and moralists.

In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the poets and novelists of the Romantic movement celebrated the wilder transports of feeling as the means by which lovers underwent the most transcendent of human experiences, but an earlier generation took a more sceptical view. Most were concerned to balance the appeal of romantic love with a more pragmatic assessment of what made marriage work. Every mid-century writer offering advice to young people insisted that, despite what novels told them, unbridled passion was not a suitable foundation on which to build a stable relationship. Love, of the more turbulent kind at least, was a transient affair, not to be confused with the more solid virtues of lasting affection. They distrusted what they regarded as disorderly and disruptive emotions. The kind of desire later so powerfully celebrated by the Brontë sisters, which hurtled through ordinary life like a disruptive hurricane, was not at all to the taste of earlier moralists, who disapproved of its intemperate volatility and thought it a most unsuitable basis for the long-haul demands of married life. ‘When you are of an age to think of settling,’ wrote one mother to her daughter in an entirely typical example of maternal advice, ‘let your attentions be placed in a sober, steady, religious man who will be tender and careful of you at all times.’7

A sensible parent would always have preferred the unexciting virtues of a George III – kindly, decent, disciplined – to the febrile glamour of a Grafton. In a society where only the richest and most powerful were able to contemplate divorce, choosing a suitable spouse was a matter of enormous significance. The perils involved in finding the right man is the subject of every one of Jane Austen’s books, whose plots usually turn on the difficulties of distinguishing the genuinely worthy candidate from competitors of greater superficial attraction but less true value. To amplify the pitfalls, her novels usually feature a bitter portrait of an ill-matched couple, with Pride and Prejudice’s Mr and Mrs Bennett perhaps the most poignant example of the destructive effects of the fateful attraction of opposites. As Austen understood, there were no second chances in Georgian marital experience, except those supplied by the capricious agency of death.

If it was a good idea to choose a partner by the application of sense rather than sensibility, it was just as important to have a realistic expectation of what even the best marriage could deliver. A life of uninterrupted bliss was not to be looked for. Those most likely to enjoy the fruits of a successful marriage were those who set a limit on their aspirations for it. Writing to a close friend who had just announced her plans to marry, the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter was certain she was too intelligent to fall into such a trap, observing primly that ‘you have too much sense to form any extravagant and romantic expectations of such a life of rapture as is inconsistent with human nature’. Carter was confident that her friend would enjoy far greater – if perhaps rather chillier – benefits as a result: ‘The sober and steady mutual esteem and affection, from a plan of life regulated upon principles of duty will be yours.’8 Wetenhall Wilkes warned his readers that ‘The utmost happiness we can expect in this world is contentment, and if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment.’9

Most of those to whom Wilkes and his many counterparts directed their arguments were, on the whole, people like themselves: thoughtful, literate, leisured, with some property and income to dispose, with the time and means to make considered decisions about matrimony. They were not poor – for those without assets, marital choices were fewer and starker – but neither were they the great monied magnates who so often considered themselves beyond the reach of regulation and advice. In most cases, it was ‘the middling sort’ who were most engaged, both as practitioners and commentators, in debates about what constituted a good marriage; but even amongst the aristocracy, some partnerships were built upon foundations of which Wilkes and his many supporters would have entirely approved.

William Petty married Sophia Carteret in 1765. He was the Earl of Shelburne, she was an earl’s daughter. They were not quite as rich as the Devonshires, but by any other standards, their income was huge. They owned property in London, Bath and Ireland, and their principal residence was Bowood in Wiltshire, a magnificent country house remodelled by Robert Adam. Within these majestic settings, they carved out for themselves a genuinely loving union, marked by shared interests, kindness and consideration, and, above all, a mutual commitment to the grand marital project.

Shelburne was one of those sober men who had looked forward to wedlock, and had been determined to make his marriage work. Like George III, he had had a difficult childhood, and was determined to create a happier world for his wife and children. In his public life, he was an ambitious politician, who was to serve the king briefly as first minister between 1782 and 1783, but in private, he was a thoughtful intellectual with a taste for the classics. In these scholarly pursuits, he found a willing partner in his wife. Sophia had been raised amongst educated women, and liked nothing more than to spend the evenings reading with her husband. Closeted in their apartments, away from the severe grandeur of the principal rooms, the couple jointly made their way through Thucydides or the works of David Hume. In this quiet intimacy, they enjoyed their happiest moments. ‘Spent the whole evening tête-à-tête in my dressing room,’ wrote Sophia in her diary. ‘Nothing can be more comfortable than we have hitherto been.’10

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