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

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