The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte and the Hanoverians

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) (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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo))

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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

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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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

*

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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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.